



Book 



CoRyrightN?. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSnV 




The True 
Life Story of 
Swiftwater Bill Gates 



By His 

Mother'iei'Latv, 
Mrs. Iota Bebbe. 







i 



Copyright 1915 



) 



TRANSFERRED f((o«' 

sopVRiSHr omeE 




»" e liii 


-6 


FEB 3 1915 





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TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I.-Swiftwater First Hears of the Gold- 
en Find on Bonanza, in the Klondike. 

CHAPTER II. -Lure of Great Wealth and Love of 
Gussie Lamore Starts Swiftwater on His Career 
—True Story of Famous Egg Episode in Dawson, 

CHAPTER III. -Swiftwater Buys Gussie 's Love by 
Giving Her Virgin Gold to the Exact Amount 
of Her Weight— Fickle Girl Jilts Him in San 
Francisco and He Marries Her Sister, Grace — 
Burglarizes His Own Residence After Quarrel 
With Bride. 

CHAPTER IV.— Our Hero, N'ow a Big Operator 
and P'romoter, IVIieets His Future Mother-in-Law 
in Seattle for the First Time. 

CHAPTER V.-Love on First Sight of Bera Beebe 
Is Followed by an Elopement, Which Ends Hap- 
lessly on the Hurricane Deck of the Steamer in 
Seattle Harbor. 

CHAPTER VI. -Swiftwater Again Elopes With 
Bera, and They Are Married in the Yukon. 

CHAPTER VII.— First Born of Swiftwater and 
Bera Sees Light of Day on Quartz Creek, Where 
First Gold Was Found in the Klondike— Finan- 



8 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

cial Entanglements Drive Swiftwater to Abandon 
Immensely Rich Property. 

CHAPTER VIII. -Swiftwater Deserts His Child 
and Authoress in DaAvson and Skips for the 
Nome Country. 

CHAPTER IX. -Hard Lines for a Deserted Wo- 
man in Dawson— Driven From Shelter by Phil 
Wilson, Swiftwater 's Friend— Mounted Police Are 
Kind to Deserving Unfortunate. 

CHAPTER X-Swiftwater Edopes AVith Kitty 
Brandon, His Fifteen-Year-Old Niece, After De- 
serting Bera in Washington, D. C— Is Pursued by 
Kitty's Mother, but Escapes at Night from Seat- 
tle. 

CHAPTER Xl.-One Woman's Ingratitude to An- 
other, Who Had Befriended Her— Bera Is Sent 
Home Penniless— The Return to Seattle. 

CHAPTER XII. -Swiftwater Returns, a Broken 
Man, to Seattle— Hides Under the Bed Clothes at 
His Hotel in Terror When Discovered by His 
Mother-in-Law— My Gems Are Pledged to Rais^e 
Money to Get Him a New Start in Alaska. 

CHAPTER XIII. -Swiftwater Gives Business Men 
Swell Banquet on Borrowed Money and Then De- 
camps for the Tanana Country— A Spring Rush to 
the New Gold Fields Brings Picturesque Crowd to 
Seattle. 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 9 

CHAPITER XlV.-Swiftwater Strikes It Rich on 
No. 6 Cleary Creek— Trip to the Interior Over 
the Ice— Swiftwater Promises to Make Repara- 
tion. 

CHAPTER XV.— We Come Out Together From the 
Tanana— Bera Has Swiftwater Arrested on Land- 
ing in Seattle for Wife Desertion. 

CHAPTER XVI.— How Swiftwater Secures His 
First Great Miscarriage of Justice— Remarkable 
Legal Tl-ansaction in a Seattle Hotel, Involving 
Court and Lawyers— Bill Persuades Bera to Se- 
cure a Divorce. 

CHAPTER XVII. -Swiftwater, Again in His Famil- 
iar Role as the Artful Dodger— I Take Another 
Trip Over the Ice to the Yukon— Gates Makes 
More Fair Promises and Then Runs Away to 
the States. 

CHAPTER XVHI.-Laws of Our Country Have 
Large Loopholes for Criminals of Wealth— Swift- 
water Travels Scot Ftee and Makes Another For- 
tune in the New Mining Camp of Rawhide, Ne- 
vada. 

CHAPTER XIX.— Nurse Abducts Clifford, Swift- 
water's Eldest Son, and Takes Him to Canada- 
Miner Fails to Make Any Effort to Recapture 
Child— Waiting to Get What Is My Own Out of 
the Northland— The End. 



PREFACE. 



T may seem odd to Alaskans, and by that 
I mean, the men and women Avho really 
live in the remote, yet near, northern 
gold country, that ''Swiftwater Bill"— 
known to both the old Sour Doughs and 
the Cheechaeos— should have asked me to write the 
real story of his life, yet this is really the fact. 

Bill Gates is in some ways, and indeed in many, 
one of the most remarkable men that the lust for 
gold ever produced in any clime or latitude. 

Remarkable ? 

Yes— that's the word— and possibly nothing more 
remarkable than that he, in a confiding moment said 
to me as he held his first born child in his arms in 
the little cabin on Quartz Creek, in the Klondike, 
where he had amassed and spent a fortune of $500,- 
000: 

''I'd like somebody to write my life story. Will 
you do it?" 

I can only believe that the romantic element in 
Swift Water Bill's character— a character as change- 
ful and variegated as the kaleidoscope— led S^vift- 
water Bill to ask me to do him this service. I was 
then the mother of his wife— the grandmother of 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 11 

his child. The sacredness of the relation must be ap- 
parent. 

Probably a great many people— hundreds, per- 
haps—may say that my labor is one that can have 
no reward, and these may speak ill things of Swift- 
water, saying, perhaps, that he is more inclined to do 
royally by strangers and to forget those who have 
aided and befriended him. 

I am not to judge Swiftwater Bill, nor do I wish 
him to be judged except as the individual reader of 
this little work may wish so to do. 

If he has turned against those near and dear to 
him— if he has preferred to give prodigally of gold 
to strangers, while at the same time forgetting his 
own obligations— I am not the one to point the finger 
of rebuke, at his eccentricities. 

For this reason, the narrative within these covers 
is confined to the facts relating to the career of 
Swiftwater Bill— a character worthy of the pen of 
a Dickens or a Dumas— with his faults and his vir- 
tues impartially portrayed as best I can do. 

lOLA BEEBE, 

Mother-in-law of Swiftwater Bill. 




MRS. lOLA BEEBE, 
Mother-in-law of Swiftwater Bill. 




CHAPTER I. 

LITTLE, low-eaved, common, ordinary 
looking road house, built of logs, 
with one room for the bunks, another 
for a kitchen and a third for miscel- 
laneous purposes, used to be well 
known to travelers in the Yukon 
Valley in Alaska at Circle City. The straggling 
little mining camp, its population divided between 
American, French-Canadians of uncertain pedigree, 
and Indians with an occasional admixture of canny 
Scotchmen, whose conversation savored strongly of 
the old Hudson Bay Trading Company's days in the 
far north, enjoyed no reputation outside of Forty 
Mile, Juneau and the Puget Sound cities of Seattle 
and Tacoma. From the wharves of these cities in 
1895 there left at infrequent intervals, small chuggy, 
wobbly steamers for Southeastern Alaska points 
usually carrying in the spring months motley cargoes 
of yelping dogs, rough coated, bearded, tanned min- 
ers and prospectors from all points of the globe, and 
great quantities of canned goods of every description. 

In those daj^s the eager and hardy prospector who 
fared forth to the Yukon's dangers in search of 
gold was usually indifferent to whatever fate befell 
him. He figured that at best the odds were over- 



14 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

whelmingly against him. with just one chance, or 
maybe ten, in a hundred of striking a pay streak. It 
was inevitable that a great proportion of the ven- 
turous and ignorant Chechacos, or newcomers, who 
paid their dollars by the hundred to the steamship 
companies in Seattle, should, after failing in the 
search for gold, seek means of gaining a miserable 
existence in some wage paid vocation. 

Were it in my power to bring my hero on the 
stage under more auspicious circumstances than 
those of w^hich I am about to tell, I would gladly 
do it. But the truth must be told of Swiftwater 
Bill, and at the time of the opening of my narrative 
—and this was before the world had ever heard the 
least hint of the wonderful Klondike gold discovery 
—Swiftwater stood washing dishes in the kitchen of 
the road-house I have just described. 

The place was no different from any one of a 
thousand of these little log shelters where men, trav- 
eling back and forth in the dead of winter with dog 
teams, find temporary lodging and a hurried meal of 
bacon and beans and canned stuff. It Avas broad day- 
light, although the clock showed eleven P. M., in 
August, 1896. The sun scarcely seemed to linger 
more than an hour beneath the horizon at nightfall, 
to re-appear a shimmering ball of light at three 
o'clock in the morning. 

'* Bring us another pot of coffee!" shouted one 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 15 

of three prospectors, who sat with their elbows on 
the table, greedily licking np the remnants of a 
huge platter full of bacon and beans garnished with 
some strips of cold, canned roast beef and some 
evaporated potatoes, which had been made into a 
kind of stew. 

The hero of my sketch wiped his hands on a 
greasy towel and, taking a dirty, black tin coffee pot 
from the top of the Yukon stove, he hurried in to 
serve his customers. 

One of these was six feet two, broad shouldered, 
sparsely built, hatchet faced, with a long nose, keen 
blue eyes and with auburn colored hair falling almost 
to his shoulders. French Joe was the name he went 
by, and no more intrepid trapper and prospector 
ever lived in the frozen valley of the Yukon than 
he. The other two were nondescripts— one with a 
coarse yellow jumper, the other in a dark blue suit of 
cast off army clothes. The man in the jumper was 
bearded, short and chunky, of German extraction, 
while the other was a half-blood Indian. 

Swiftwater, as he ambled into the room, one hand 
holding his dirty apron, the other holding the cof- 
fee pot, was not such a man as to excite the interest 
of even a wayfarer in the road-house at Circle. 
About 35 years old, five feet five inches tall, a scrag- 
gly growth of black whiskers on his chin, and long, 
wavv motistaches of the same color, curlinf:: from his 



16 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 






)Hash «4°-^ 

— (bunks *5°-° 

\TE5^MS 



I'ilWIi 



n((((iUl(i([l'HlUw. A;(((((((l(ffl^^^ 




m 



SWIFTWATER HEARS FROM FRENCH JOE THE FIRST 
NEWS OF THE GOLD DISCOVERY IN THE KLONDIKE. 



SWIFTWATBR BILL. 17 

upper lip, Swiftwater did not arouse even a passing 
glance from the trio at the table. 

"Boys, de' done struck it, al' right, 'cause Indian 
George say it's all gold from ze gras' roots, on Bo- 
nanza. An' it's only a leetle more'n two days polin' 
up ze river from ze T'hoandike." 

It was French Joe who spoke, and then when 
he drew forth a little bottle containing a few ounces 
of gold nuggets and dust, Swiftwater Bill, as he 
poured the third cup of coffee, gazed open mouthed 
on the showing of yellow treasure. 

It is only necessary to say that from that moment 
SwiftAvater was attentive to the needs of his three 
guests, and when he had overheard all of their talk 
he silently, but none the less positively, made up 
his mind to quit his job forthwith and to ''mush" 
for the new gold fields. 

And this is why it was that, the next morning, the 
little Circle City road-house was minus a dishwasher 
and all round handyman. And before the little com- 
munity was well astir, far in the distance, up the 
Yukon river, might have been seen the little, dark 
bearded man poling for dear life in a flat-bottom 
boat, whose prow was pointed in the direction of the 
Klondike river. 



CHAPTER II. 





iT WOULD be useless to encumber my 
story with a lengthy and detailed nar- 
rative of Swiftwater Bill's experi- 
ences in the first mad rush of gold- 
seekers up the narrow and devious 
channels of Bonanza and Eldo- 
rado Creeks. The world has for 
eleven years known the entrancing story of George 
Carmack's find on Bonanza— how, from the first 
spadeful of grass roots, studded with gold dust and 
nuggets, which filled a tiny vial, the gravel beds 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 19 

of Bonanza and Eldorado and a few adjoining 
creeks, all situated within the area of a township 
or two, produced the marvelous sum of $50,000,000 
within a few years. 

Swiftwater struck gold from the very first. He 
located No. 13 Eldorado, and had as his neighbors 
such well known mining men as Prof. T. S. Lippy, 
the Seattle millionaire, who left a poorly paid job 
as physical director of the Y. M. C. A. in Seattle to 
prospect for gold in Alaska ; Ole Oleson ; the Berry 
Bros., who cleaned up a million dollars on two and 
a fraction claims on Eldorado ; Antone Stander ; 
Michael Dore, a young French-Canadian, who died 
from exposure in a little cabin surrounded by tin 
oil cans filled to overflowing with the yellow metal, 
and others equally well known. 

Swiftwater 's ground on No. 13 Eldorado was fab- 
ulously rich— so rich that after he had struck the 
pay streak, the excitement was too much for him 
and he forthwith struck out for the trail that 
leads to Dawson. And now I am about to reveal 
to Alaskans and others who read this little book a 
quality about Swiftwater of w^hich few people had 
any knowledge whatever, and this shows in a start- 
ling way how easy it was in those halcyon days in 
the Golden Klondike for a man to grasp a fortune 
of a million dollars in an instant and then throw it 



20 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

away with the ease and indifference that a smoker 
discards a half-burned cigar. 

Swiftwater, as may well be imagined, when he 
struck the rich layers of gold in the candle-lit crev- 
ices of bedrock on Eldorado a few feet below the 
surface, could have had a half interest in a half 
dozen claims on each side of him if he had simply 
kept his mouth shut and informed those he knew in 
Dawson of the strike, on condition that they would 
share half and half with him. This was a common 
transaction in those days and a perfectly legitimate 
one, and Swiftwater could have cleaned up that 
winter beyond question $1,000,000 in gold dust, after 
paying all expenses and doing very little w^ork him- 
self, had he exercised the most common, ordinary 
business ability. 

Instead, Swiftwater, when he struck Dawson, 
threw down a big poke of gold on the bar of a 
saloon and announced his intention of buying out 
the finest gambling hall and bar in town. Dawson 
was then the roughest kind of a frontier mining 
camp, although the mounted police preserved very 
good order. There w^ere at least a score of gambling 
halls in Dawson and as many more dance halls. 
The gambling games ran continually twenty-four 
hours a day, and the smallest wager usually made, 
even in the poorest games, was an ounce of gold, or 
almost $20. 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 21 

When Bill laid down his poke of gold on the bar 
of a Dawson saloon— it was so heavy he could hardly 
lift it— he Avas instantly surrounded by a mob of 
thirty or forty men and a few women. 

''Why, boys!" said Swiftwater, ordering a case 
of wine for the thirsty, while he chose appolinaris 
himself, "that's easy enough! All you've got to do 
is to go up to Eldorado Creek and you can get all 
the gold you want by simply working a rocker 
about a week." 

That settled the fate of Eldorado, for the next 
day before three o'clock in the morning there was a 
stampede to the new find, and in twenty-four hours 
the whole creek had been staked from mouth to 
source. 

Comfortably enjoying the knowledge that he had 
$300,000 or $400,000 in gold to the good, Swiftwater 
set about finding w^ays to spend it. 

His first order "to the outside" was for a black 
Prince Albert coat and a black silk top hat, 
which came in in about five or six weeks and were 
immediately donned by Swiftwater. By this time 
he had become the owner of the Monte Carlo, the 
biggest gambling hall in Dawson. 

"Tear the roof off, boys!" Swiftwater said when 
the players on the opening night swarmed in and 
asked what was the limit of the bets. 

"The sky is the limit and raise her up as far as 



22 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

you want to go, boys," said Swiftwater, "and if the 
roof's in your way, tear it off!" 

Just about this time came the first of Swiftwater 's 
affaires d' I'amour, because a day or two previously 
five young women of the Juneau dance halls had 
floated down the river in a barge and gone to work 
in Dawson. There were two sisters in the group. 
Both of them were beautiful women, young, bright 
entertaining and clever in the way such w^omen are. 
They were Gussie and May Lamore. 

''I am going to have a lady and the swellest that's 
in the country," Swiftwater told his friends, and 
then, donning his best clothes, the costliest he could 
buy in Dawson, Swiftwater Avent over to the dance 
hall, where the Lamore sisters were working, and 
ordered wine for everybody on the floor. 

Gussie was dancing with a big, brawny, French- 
Canadian miner. Her little feet seemed scarcely to 
touch the floor of the dance hall as the miner 
whirled her around and around. She was little, 
plump, beautifully formed and with a face of more 
than passing comeliness. 

You women of ''the States"— when I say ''the 
States" I simply speak of our country as do all the 
old-timers in Alaska, and not as if it was some 
foreign country, but as it really is to us, the home 
of ourselves and our forebears, yet separated from 
us bv thousands of miles of iceclad mountain barriers 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 23 

and storm swept seas have no conception of 
the dance hall girl as a type of the early- 
days of Dawson. Many of the were of good 
families, young, comely, and fairly well edu- 
cated. What stress or storm befell them, or other 
inhospitable element in their lives drove them to the 
northern gold mining country, God knows it is not 
my portion to tell. Nor could any one of them 
probably, in telling her own life story, give the 
reasons for the appearance in these dance halls of 
any of her sisters. 

It is enough for you and me to understand— and it 
requires no unusual insight into the human heart 
and its mysteries to do so— that when a miner 
had spent a few months in the solitude of the hills 
and gold lined gulches of the Yukon Valley, if he 
finally found the precious gold on the rim of the 
bedrock, his first thought was to go back to "town." 

Back to town? Yes, because "town" meant and 
still means to those hardy men any place where 
human beings are assembled, and the dance hall, in 
those rough days, was the center of social activities 
and gaieties. 

The sight of little Gussie Lamore, with her skirt 
just touching the tops of her shoes, spinning around 
in a waltz with that big French-Canadian, set all of 
Bill's amorous nature aglow. He went to the hotel, 
filled his pockets with pokes of gold dust and came 



24 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

quickly back to the dance hall, where he obtained 
an introduction to Gussie. 

Bill's wooing was of the rapid kind. Before the 
night was over he had told Gussie— 

''I'll give you your weight in gold tomorrow 
morning if you will marry me— and I guess you'll 
weigh about $30,000." 

Pretty Gussie shook her head coquettishly. ''We 
will just be friends, Swiftwater, and I guess that'll 
be about all." 

Of course, it was only a day or two before all 
Dawson knew of Swiftwater 's infatuation. The two 
became fast friends and got along beautifully for a 
week or two. Then came a bitter quarrel, and 
from that arose the incident which gave Swiftwater 
Bill almost his greatest fame— it is the story of 
how he cornered the egg market in Dawson in a 
valiant effort to hold the love of his sweetheart. 
Gussie Lamore. 

It was in the spring of 1898 and Dawson was 
very short of grub of every kind. The average meal 
of canned soup, a plate of beans garnished by a few 
slices of baeon or canned meat, with a little side 
dish of canned or dried potatoes stewed, hot cakes or 
biscuit and coffee, cost about $5 and sometimes more. 
The cheapest meal for two persons was $10, and Bill 
had seen to it, while trying to win Gussie for his 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 25 

Avife, that she had the best there was to eat in 
Dawson. 

The two were inseparable on the streets. Then 
came the quarrel— it was simply a little lovers' dis- 
pute, and then the break. 

Swiftwater put in two days assiduously cultivating 
the friendly graces of the other dance hall girls in 
Dawson, but Gussie cared not. 

One night an adventurous trader came down from 
the Upper Yukon in a small boat— there were no 
steamers then— and brought two crates of fresh eggs 
from Seattle. 

Swiftwater heard of this, and he knew that there 
would be a tremendous demand for those eggs, as 
the miners usually made their breakfasts of the 
evaporated article; so, shrewdly, he went immedi- 
ately to the restaurant which had purchased the 
crates and called for the proprietor. 

Now, this worthy knew Swiftwater to be im-' 
mensely wealthy and a very good customer, so when 
the Eldorado miner demanded the right to buy every 
egg in the house, which meant every egg in town, the 
restaurant man stroked his chin and said : 

''Swiftwater, those eggs cost me a big lot of 
money, and there hain't no more. You can have the 
hull outfit for three dollars an egg, in dust." 

There was just one whole crate left, and Swift- 
water weighed out $2,280 in gold dust. 



26 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

''Those eg'o;s are mine— keep them here and don't 
let anybody have any." 

Now, Swiftwater and Gussie had been in the habit 
of breakfasting on fresh eggs some days before, 
when the first infrequent trader of the season had 
managed, after enduring several wrecks on the 
upper river, to reach Dawson. Fresh eggs were to 
Gussie what chocolates and bon bons are to the 
average girl in the States. 

The next morning Swiftwater arrived at the 
restaurant for breakfast, a little earlier than usual, 
and in a few minutes the w^aiter placed before him a 
steaming hot platter containing an even dozen of the 
eggs, nicely poached and served on small strips of 
toast. 

Just then Gussie came in for her breakfast and 
seated herself at the other end of the little dining 
room. It was long after the usual hour for break- 
fast, and they were the only two in the room. With- 
out doing Swiftwater the honor of passing so much 
as a glance in his direction, Gussie said to the 
waiter : 

''Bring me a full order of fried eggs." 

"We ain't got no eggs, mum; they was all sold 

out last night," said the waiter. 

Gussie 's face flamed with anger, but only for 

an instant. Then she picked up her plate, her knife 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 



27 




SWIFTWATER AND GUSSIE LAMORE ARE RECONCILED 
OVER A HOT PLATTER OF FRESH EGGS, AT DAWSON. 



28 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

and fork and napkin and strode over to the table 
where Swiftwater sat, 

'*I guess I'll have some eggs, after all," said Gus- 
sie, without looking at Swiftwater, as she liberally 
helped herself from his platter. 

Then both of them burst out laughing and peace 
reigned once more between them. 

Of course, Swiftwater figured that he had won a 
substantial victory by reaching Gussie's heart 
through her stomach. But, as a matter of fact, we 
all figured that the laugh was on Swiftwater, and I 
think every woman who reads this story will agrei 
with me. 




CHAPTER III. 

WIPTAVATER has often told me that he 
never could quite understand why it 
was that the way to a woman's 
heart, even his own way— Swift- 
water's— was so hard to travel and so 
devious and tortuous in its windings 
and interwindings. 

''Why, Mrs. Beebe," Swiftwater used to say, "I 
should think a man could do anything with gold ! 
And for my own part, I used to always figure that 
money would buy anything," said Swiftwater, "even 
the most beautiful woman in the world for your 
wife." 

Swiftwater 's mental processes were simple, as the 
foregoing will illustrate. It was hardly to be ex- 
pected otherwise. Swiftwater decamped from the 
drudgery and slavish toil of a kitchen in the little 
road-house at Circle Cit}'- to gain in less than three 
months more money than he had ever dreamed it 
possible for him to have. 

Two hundred thousand dollars was the minimum 
of Swiftwater 's first big cleanup. If Gussie Lamore 
had lovers, Swiftwater figured, his money would 
win her heart away from all the rest. 

All this relates verv intimatelv to the reallv 



30 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

interesting story of SAviftwater's courtship of Gussie 
Lamore. The girl kept him at arm's length, yet if 
ever Swiftwater became restive GiLssie would 
cleverly draw the line taut and Swiftwater was at 
her feet. 

''I am tired of this, Gussie," said Swiftwater 
one day, and finally the ''Kjiight of the Golden 
Omelette," as he was often termed, was serious for 
once in his life. 

''I am going back to Eldorado and I'll bring 
down here a bunch of gold. It will weigh as much 
as you do on the scales, pound for pound. Gussie, 
that gold will be yours if you give me your word 
you will marry me." 

"All right, Bill, Ave '11 see. Go get your gold and 
show me that you really have it." 

Swiftwater was gone from Dawson about two 
days before he returned to the dance hall where 
Gussie was working. This time he kept away from 
the bar and merely waited until the morning 
dawned and the habitues of the dance hall had dis- 
appeared one by one. By that time the word had 
been sent out to Seattle of the rich findings of gold 
on Eldorado, and the early crop of newcomers was 
arriving over the ice from Dyea, in the daj^s before 
the Skagway trail Avas knoAvn. 

Swiftwater. in the earlv morning, carried to Gus- 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 31 

sie's apartments two tin coffee cans filled with the 
yellow gold. 

''Here's all you weigh, anyhow," said Swift- 
water. "Now, take this gold to the Trading Com- 
pany's office and bank it. Then I want yon to buy 
a ticket to San Francisco and I will meet you there 
this summer and we will be married." 

Thus ended the curious story of Swiftwater's 
wooing of Gussie Lamore. All the world knows 
how, when Gussie reached San Francisco, where 
her folks lived, she banked Swiftwater's gold and 
turned him down cold. 

Swift water reached the Golden Gate a month 
after Gussie had arrived at her home. All his en- 
treaties for her to carry out her bargain came to 
nothing. 

Bitter as he was towards Gussie, Swiftwater 
still seemed to love the girl. His first creed, "I can 
buy any woman with gold," seemed to stick with 
him. 

There was, for one thing, little Grace Lamore. It 
came to Swiftwater that he could marry Grace and 
punish Gussie for her inconstancy. 

Now, this may seem to you, my reader, like an ill- 
founded story. Yet the truth is, Grace and Swift- 
water were married within a month of his arrival in 
San FranciscOj and the San Francisco papers were 
filled with the storv of how Swiftwater bouuht his 



32 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

bride a $15,000 home in Oakland and furnished it 
most beautifully with all that money could buy. 

Swiftwater and Grace, after a two days' wedding 
trip down the San Joaquin Valley leased the 
bridal chamber of the Baldwin Hotel, while their 
new home in Oakland was being- fitted up. Old- 
time Alaskans will smile when I recall the impres- 
sion that Swiftwater made on San Franciscans. 

It was his invariable custom to stand in front o^ 
the lobby of the Baldwin every evening, smoothly 
shaved, his moustaches nicely brushed and euriecr, 
and wearing his favorite black Prince Albert and 
silk hat. 

Probably few in the throng that came and went 
through the lobby of the Baldwin— in those days 
one of the most popular hostelries in San Francisco 
—would have paid any attention to Swiftwater. 
But Bill knew a trick or two and his old-time 
friends have told me that Swiftwater made it an 
unfailing custom to tip the bell-boys a dollar each a 
day to point to the dapper little man and have them 
tell both guests of the Baldwin and strangers : 

''There is Swiftwater Bill Gates, the King of 
the Klondike." 

And Swiftwater Avould stand every evening, silk 
hat on his head, spick and span, and clean, and bow 
politely to everybody as they came in through the 
lobby to the dining hall. 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 



33 




SWIFTWATER GREETS STRANGERS IN THE LOBBY OF 
THE BALDWIN HOTEL, WHOM HE HAD NEVER SEEN 
BEFORE. 



34 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

Isn't it curious, that with all his money, and 
his confidence in the purchasing power of gold, 
Swiftwater's dream of love with Grace La- 
more should have lasted scarcely more than a short 
three weeks ? It Avas not that Swiftwater was parsi- 
monious with is money— the very finest of silks and 
satins, millinery, diamonds at Shreve's, cut glass 
and silverware, were Grace's for the asking. They 
will tell you in San Francisco to this day that 
Swiftwater and his bride worked overtime in a 
carriage shopping in the most expensive houses 
in the city of the Golden Gate. 

Then came the break with Grace. I do not know 
the cause, but the girl threw Swiftwater overboard 
and left the bridal chamber of the Baldwin to 
return to her family, even before they had occupied 
the palatial home in Oakland. 

Swiftwater's rage knew no bounds. In his heart 
he cursed the whole Lamore family and quickly 
topk means to vent his spite. 

This is how it came about that scarcely a month 
after Swiftwater's wedding bells had rung, the 
''Knight of the Golden Omelette" was seen to enter 
his Oakland home one evening and emerge there- 
from a half hour later bearing on his back a heavy 
bundle wrapped in a bed sheet. 

The burden was all that Swiftwater's strength 
could manage. Laboriouslv he toiled his wav to 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 



35 




SWIFTWATER BILL CARRYING $7,000 WORTH OF WED- 
DING PRESENTS FROM HIS BRIDE'S HOME IN OAK- 
LAND. 



36 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

the house of a friend in Oakland and wearily de- 
posited his bundle on the front porch, where he sat 
and waited the coming of his friend. 

When Swiftwater was finally admitted to the 
house, he untied the sheet and opened up the con- 
tents of the pack. There lay glittering on the floor 
$7,000 worth of solid silver plate and cut glass. 

''That's what I gave my bride," he said, ''and 

now she's quit me and I'm d d if she'll have 

that." 




CHAPTER IV. 

r HAS always seemed a standing wonder 
to me that when Swiftwater had sepa- 
rated himself from about $100,000 or 
more in gold dust with the Lamore sis- 
ters as the chief beneficiaries, and after 
he had been divorced from Grace, fol- 
lowing her refusal to live with him in 
San Francisco, he did not finally come within a 
rifle shot of the realization of the real value of 
money. There is no doubt but that S^viftwater 
was bitterly resentful towards Gussie and Grace 
Lamore after they had both thrown him over- 
board, and you will no doubt agree with me that 
to an ordinary man such experiences as these would 
have had a sobering effect. 

Instead, however, the miner plunged more reck- 
lessly than ever into all manner of monejMnaking 
and money-spending, and the only reason that 
Swiftwater Bill Gales is not ranked today with 
Flood, Mackay and Fair as one of a group of 
the greatest and richest mining men the Pacific 
Coast has produced, is that he did not have the bal- 
ance wheel of caution and discretion that is given 
to the ordinary artisan or day laborer. 

Swiftwater left San Francisco soon after his rup- 



38 SWIFT WATER BILL. 

ture with Grace Lamore and went directly to Otta- 
wa, Canada, where, marvelous as it may seem in 
the light of the ten years of mining history in the 
north, Swiftwater induced the Dominion govern- 
ment to grant him a concession on Quartz Creek, in 
the Klondike, worth today millions upon millions. 

This concession covered an immense tract of 
ground at least three miles long and in some places 
two miles wide. IMuch of the ground was very 
rich, and today, ten years later, it is paying big 
dividends. Yet rich as it was and immensely val- 
uable as was the enormous concession, Swiftwater 
induced the Dominion of Canada authorities to part 
with it for merely a nominal consideration. His suc- 
cess in this respect cannot be otherwise regarded 
than phenomenal. Although- his money was nearly 
all gone, Swiftwater, taking a new grip on himself, 
and entirely disregardful of the fates which had 
been so lavish to him, went from Ottawa to 
London, England, where he obtained enough money 
to buy and ship to Dawson one of the largest and 
most expensive hydraulic plants in the country. 

When this plant was shipped to Seattle in 1898, 
Swiftwater followed it to the city on Elliott Bay. 

It was the day following Swiftwater Bill's ar- 
rival in Seattle from San Francisco in the spring 
of 1899 that Uv. Richardson, an old Seattle friend 
of mine, who know Gntes well, telephoned me that 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 39 

Swiftwater had an elegant suite of apartments at 
the Butler Hotel, and that he had asked him. to 
arrange for an introduction. i\[r. Richardson said 
over the telephone : 

"You ought to know Swiftwater— he knows 
everybody in Dawson and the Klondike, and for a 
woman like you to go into that country with a big 
hotel outfit and no friends would be ridiculous." 

When I think of what happened to me and my 
daughters, Blanche and Bera, in the next few days 
following this incident, and of the .years of wretch- 
edness and misery and laying waste of human lives 
and happiness that came after, I am tempted to 
wonder what curious form of an unseen fate shapes 
our destinies and turns arid twists our fortunes 
in all manner of devious and uncertain ways. 

My whole hotel outfit had gone up to St. Michael 
the fall previous and I with it— and at great cost 
of labor and trouble I had seen to it, at St. Mchael, 
that the precious shipment— representing all I had 
in the world— was safely stored aboard a river 
steamer bound for Dawson. 

Now, spring had come again, and with it the 
big rush to the gold fields of the Yukon was on, 
and Seattle was again filled with a seething, surg- 
ing, struggling, discontented, optimistic, laughing 
crowd of gold hunters of every nationality and 
color. 



40 SWIFT WATER BILL. 

It was almost worth your life to try to break 
through the mob and gain admission to the lobby 
of the Hotel Butler in those days, for the place was 
absolutely packed at night with men as thick as 
sardines in a box, and all shouting and gesticulatini^ 
and keeping up such a clatter that it drove one 
nearly crazy. 

It was no place for a woman, and the few women 
whose fortunes or whose husbands had brought 
them thither were seated in a little parlor on the 
second floor, where they could easily hear the clam- 
or and confusion that came from the noisy mob in 
the lobby. 

In the crowd were such old-time sourdoughs as 
Ole Olson, who sold out a little piece of ground 
about as big as a city block on Eldorado for $250,- 
000, after he had taken out as much more in three 
months' work the winter previous; ''French Curley" 
De Lorge, known from White Horse to the mouth 
of the Tanana as one of the Yukon's bravest 
and strongest hearted trappers and freighters: 
Joe Ladue, who laid out the town of Dawson; 
George Carmack, whose Indian brother-in-law, 
Skookum Jim, is supposed to have turned 
over the first spadeful of grass roots studded 
with gold on the banks of Bonanza; big 
Tom Henderson, who found gold before any- 
body, he always said, on Quartz Creek; Joe Ward- 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 41 

ner and Phil O'Ronrke, both famous in the Coeur 
d'Alenes; Henry Bratnober, six feet two, black 
beard, shaggy black hair and black eyes, over- 
bearing and coarse voiced, the representative in 
the golden north of the Rothschilds of London; and 
men almost equally well known from Australia, 
from South Africa and from continental Europe, 
including the vigilant and energetic Count Carbon- 
neau of Paris. 

By appointment, Swiftwater, attired in immacu- 
late black broadcloth Prince Albert, low cut vest, 
patent leather shoes, shimmering "biled" shirt, 
with a four-karat diamond gleaming like an electric 
light from his bosom, stood waiting for us in the 
parlor. I had left Bera, who was fifteen years old, 
in my apartments in the Hinckley Block and had 
taken Blanche, my eldest daughter, with me. 

^'I am awfully glad to meet you, Mrs. Beebe," 
said Swiftwater, advancing with step as noiseless as 
a IMaltese cat, as he walked across the heavy plush 
carpet. 

Swiftwater put out a soft womanish hand, 
grasped mine and spoke in a low musical voice, the 
kind of voice that instantly wins the confidence of 
nine women out of ten. 

"I have heard that you were going in this spring, 
and as I know how hard it is for a woman to get 
along in that country without someone to befriend 



42 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

her, I was very glad indeed to have the chance of 
extending you all the aid in my power," continued 
Swiftwater, in the meantime glancing in an inter- 
ested way at Blanche, who stood near the piano. 

"This is my daughter, Blanche, Mr. Gates," I 
said. Blanche was then nineteen years old, and 
I had taken her out of the Convent school in Port- 
land to keep me company in the north, along with 
Bera. 

It only took us a few minutes to agree that when 
I arrived in Dawson, if Swiftwater was there first, 
he should help me in getting a location for my 
hotel and settling down. Then, as I arose to go, 
he said, turning again to Blanche: 

''Doesn't your daughter play the piano, Mrs. 
Beebe? I am very fond of music." 

Blanche, at a nod from me, sat down and began 
to play some simple little thing, when Swiftwater 
said : 

''Please excuse me, I have a friend with me." 

In a moment Swiftwater returned and in- 
troduced his friend, a tall, lithe, clean-cut, smooth 
shaven Englishman of about thirty-five— Mr. Hath- 
away. 

Five minutes later, Blanche having pleased both 
men with her playing, arose from the piano. 

"Now, we are just going down to dinner in the 
grill; won't you please join us, ladies?" said Swift- 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 43 

water in those deliciously velvet tones which seemed 
to put any woman at perfect ease in his company. 

A shivery feeling came over me, and I said: "No, 
I think we will go right home." 

Now, I never could tell for the life of me just 
what made me want to hurry away with my Blanche 
from the hotel and Swiftwater Bill. His friend 
Hathaway was a nice clean looking sort of a 
chap and very gentlemanly, and Swiftwater was 
the absolute quintessence of gentlemanly conduct 
and chivalry. But the papers had told all about 
Swiftwater and Gussie and Grace Lamore— only 
that the reporters, as well as the general public, 
seemed to regard it all as a joke— Gussie 's turning 
down Swiftwater after he had given her her weight 
in gold— about $30,000 in virgin dust and nuggets— 
and then Bill's marrying Grace, her sister, for spite. 
The whole yarn struck me so funny, that as we 
walked, with difficulty, through the crowds on Sec- 
ond Avenue to our apartments, I could not think of 
anything mean or vicious about Swiftwater. 

Nevertheless, I scrupulously avoided inviting 
Swiftwater to call, and after I had concluded my 
business with him, I determined to have nothing 
more to do with him until business matters made it 
necessary in Dawson. You women, who live "on 
the outside" and have never been over the trail and 
down the Yukon in a scow, can never know what 



44 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

fortitude is necessary for a woman to cut loose 
from the States and make her own w^ay in business 
in a new gold camp like Dawson was in 1899. 

So it was only natural, that, knowing Swiftwater 
to be one of the leading and richest men in that 
country, I should have accepted his offer of assist- 
ance and advice. Cjod only knows how different 
would have been all our lives could I but have 
foreseen the aw^ful misery and wretchedness and 
ruin which that man Swiftwater easily worked in 
the lives of three innocent people who had never 
done him w^rong, or anyone else, for that matter. 

Three days after my glimpse of Swiftwater Bill, 
Bera and myself were just finishing dressing for 
dinner in my big sitting room. It was rather warm 
for a spring evening in Seattle, and we were all 
hungry. Blanche was waiting near the door fully 
dressed, I was putting on my gloves, and little Bera, 
fifteen years old, stood in front of the mirror trying 
to fasten down a big bunch of wavy brown hair of 
silken glossy texture, which was doing its best 
to get from under her big white Leghorn hat, the 
child looking the ver}^ picture of beauty and inno- 
cence. 

She was plump, w^th deliciously pink cheeks, 
great big blue eyes, regular features and she wore 
a dress I had had made at great expense in Victoria 
—it was of dark blue voile, close fitting, with a 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 45 

lining of red silk, which showed the cardinal a-s 
the girl turned and walked across the room and 
then back again to the mirror. Her white Leghorn 
hat was trimmed with large red roses. I heard 
a noise, as if someone had knocked and Bera, turn- 
ing quickly, said under her breath, as if alarmed : 

"Mama! There is somebody there!" 

I looked and there stood Swiftwater, silk hat in 
hand, smiling, bowing, one foot across the threshold, 
while behind him loomed the tall form of his friend 
Hathaway. 

"Pardon us, won't you, Mrs. Beebe, but we want 
you to go to dinner with us at the Butler. Won't 
you do so and bring the girls?" and Swiftwater 
instantly turned his eyes from mine and looked at 
Bera standing in front of the mirror, her face 
flushed, her eyes sparkling with excitement and her 
form silhouetted against a red plush curtain which 
covered the door to the adjoining room. 

Before I could gather my wits about me I had 
accepted Swiftwater 's invitation. It was the only 
thing I could do, because we were just about to go 
to dinner ourselves, and he seemed to know that 
instinctively, and that I could not very well refuse. 




CHAPTER V. 

AMA," said Bera to me, ''Mrs. Ainslee 
is not nearly so well today, and 
Mr. Hathaway said when he came 
down from the hospital this after- 
noon that she wanted to see you sure 
this evening about seven o'clock." 

Mrs. Ainslee had been desperately 
ill at Providence Hospital for weeks 
and she was a woman of whom I had 
known in earlier days and whose sad 
plight— her husband was dead and 
she was alone in the world— had induced me to do 
all I could for her. 

It was scarcely more than a week following the 
evening that Swiftwater and ^Ir. Hathaway was host 
at dinner at the hotel, that Bera took, what I real- 
ized afterwards, was an unusual and unexpected in- 
terest in Mrs. Ainslee 's case. Since the dinner engage- 
ment, Swiftwater had been just ordinarily attentive 
to myself and my two daughters, although frequent- 
ly asking us to go to the theatre with him and 
sending flowers almost daily to our apartments. I 
had not seen Mrs. Ainslee for two or three days, and 
my conscience rather troubled me about her, so 
that when, on this day— a day that will never fade 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 47 

from my mind as long as I live, nor from that of 
Bera or Swiftwater— I quickly fell into Bera's plans 
and determined to get some things together for 
Mrs. Ainslee, including a bunch of roses from h 
vase on mj^ dresser, and go to the hospital after 
dinner. 

Providence Hospital was scarcely more than five 
blocks from our apartments. I had not seen any- 
thing of Swiftwater or Hathaway all day. Tired 
even beyond the ordinary— it had been a long, hard 
fight to get my affairs in shape for the northern 
trip— I left the apartments a little before seven 
o'clock that fateful evening and walked up Second 
Avenue to Madison and thence up to Fifth Avenue 
to Providence Hospital. 

"Mrs. Ainslee is feeling some better, Mrs. Beebe, 
but the doctor is in there now and you will have to 
wait for a few minutes." the head nurse told me at 
the landing on the second floor. The steamer "Hum- 
boldt" was sailing for Alaska that night, and I had 
managed to get off a few things consigned to my- 
self at Dawson and had seen them safely placed 
aboard ship. 

As I sat waiting for the signal to come into Mrs 
Ainslee 's room— it must have been a half hour or 
more before the nurse came to me and said I should 
enter— a curious feeling came over me res:arding 
Bera. I had never known of her speaking about 



48 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

Mrs. Ainslee and somehow or other I could not get 
out of my mind the thought that possibly Swift- 
water and his friend Hathaway might leave for 
Skagway on the "Humboldt." 

Philosophers may talk of a woman's sixth sense 
as some people talk of the cunning of a cat. What- 
ever it was, as the nurse beckoned me to come into 
Mrs. Ainslee 's room, I quickly arose, went in and 
said to the sick woman: 

''Mrs. Ainslee, I am awfully glad to see that you 
are better and I wanted to visit with you for an 
hour, but I have overstayed my time already and 
I must hurry back to my rooms." 

Then I quickly turned and in another minute I 
was hurrying down the Madison Street hill to the 
Hinckley Block. In every step I took nearer my 
home there came a keener and more tense pulling at 
my heart strings— a feeling that something had hap- 
pened in my own home. It was no wonder that the 
elevator boy in the Hiinckley Block was dumb- 
founded to see me rush across Second Avenue and 
half way up the stairs to the second floor before he 
could call to me, saying he would take me up in the 
car if I was not in too big a hurry. 

The next moment I was in my rooms, and for the 
life of me I cannot begin to describe their looks. 
IMy clothes and personal belongings were scattered 
all over the room, my big trunk had been emptied 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 49 

of its contents and was missing. The bureau draw- 
ers were empty and the place really looked like a 
Kansas rancher's house after a cyclone. 

On the dresser was a little note— in Bera's hand- 
w^riting, held down by a bronze paperweight sur- 
mounted by a tiny, but beautiful miniature of a 
woman's form. It was Bera's last birthday gift 
to me. 

''We have gone to Alaska with Swiftwater and 
Mr. Hathaway. Do not w^orry, mama, as when 
we get there we will look out for your hotel." 

''BERA." 

That was Bera's note. I looked at my watch. It 
was 7:25 and I knew the ''Humboldt" sailed at 8 
o'clock. I rushed down four flights of stairs, never 
thinking of the elevator, gained the street and 
hailed a passing hackman. 

"You can have this if you get to the 'Humboldt' 
at Schwabacher's dock before she sails!" I cried 
as the cabby drew his team to the curb, and then I 
handed him a ten dollar gold piece. 

Whipping his horses to a gallop, the hackman 
drove at a furious pace down First Avenue to 
Spring Street and thence to the dock. He all but 
knocked over a policeman as the horses under his 
whip surged through the crowd which stood around 
the dock waiting for the departure of the "Hum- 
boldt." 



50 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

"My two daughters are on that boat and Swift- 
water Bill Gates has stolen them from me!" I 
shouted as I grabbed hold of the arm of a big police- 
man near the entrance to the dock. "I Avant you to 
get those girls off that boat before she sails, no mat- 
ter what happens!" 

In another minute the policeman was fighting his 
way with all the force of his 250 pounds through 
the mob of five thousand people that hung around 
the gang plank of the ''Humboldt." The ship's 
lights Avere burning brightly and everybody was 
laughing and talking, and a few women crying as 
they said goodbj^ to husbands, sweethearts or 
friends aboard the ship. 

It was just exactly ten minutes before sailing 
time when we finally made our way to the main deck 
through the crowd. I fairly shouted to the captain 
on the bridge : 

''My two daughters are on this ship hidden away, 
and I want them taken ofi:' this boat before you 
leave!" 

Capt. Bateman looked at me a moment as if he 
w^anted to throw me overboard. 

"Who are your daughters and what are they 
doing on my ship?" 

"My daughters are Blanche and Bera Beebe and 
Swiftwater Bill has stolen them and is takinsr them 
to Alaska. I am Mrs. Beebe, their mother." 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 51 

For the moment that ended the discussion with 
Capt. Bateman. Instantly turning to a quartermas- 
ter, he said: 

"Help this woman find her daughters!" 

A half an hour and then an hour passed as we 
worked our way from one stateroom to another on 
the saloon deck and the upper deck without avail. 
Capt. Bateman was furious at the dela3^ 

''Mrs. Beebe, I do not believe your daughters 
are here," he said. "Swiftwater has engaged one 
room, but we have not seen him yet." 

Just then the quartermaster turned to unlock the 
door of a stateroom on the starboard side near the 
stern of the ship. The lock failed to work. 

"There is somebody in there," he said, "and the 
dock is locked from the inside." 

"Break it in!" ordered Capt. Bateman. 

The next instant the door flew off its hinges as 
the big quartermaster shoved a burly shoulder 
against it. The room was dark. I rushed in, to find 
Bera lying on the couch, sobbing as if her heart 
would break. 

As quickly as possible, I got the girls out and 
turned them over to the custody of Capt. Bateman. 

"These are my daughters, and I will not allow 
them to be taken from me." 

"Take 'em ashore!" ordered Capt. Bateman to 
the quartermaster. 



52 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 




"COME TO THE STATION WITH US," SAID THE OF- 
FICER, DRAGGING FORTH THE SHAPELESS MASS, 
AND HELPING SWIFTWATER ADJUST HIS SILK TILE, 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 53 

''But I want you to find that scoundrel Swift- 
water!" said I, turning on the policeman, who stooc^ 
just behind me. 

"You'll not keep us here any longer," angrily 
said the ship's master. 

"0, yes, we will!" said the officer, showing more 
grit than I expected. 

Then began the search all over again. The hurri- 
cane deck was the last resort, the ship having been 
searched from her hold clear through the steerage 
and saloon cabins to the main deck. 

On the main deck there were a half dozen life- 
boats securely lashed in their proper places. It w^as 
dark by this time, but, curiously enough, there was 
a little fluttering electric arc light near the end of 
the warehouse on the dock, close to the after end of 
the boat. 

That lamp must have been burning that night 
through some of the mysterious and indefinable laws 
of Providence or some other thing, because by its 
glare I could see a huddled, shapeless, black form 
underneath the last lifeboat on the upper deck. 

' ' That 's him ! " I said, pointing at the shapeless 
mass in the shadow of the lifeboat. 

The policeman walked over to the boat, stretched 
forth a big muscular arm, grasped the formless object 
and drew forth— Swiftwater Bill. 

"Come to the station with us," said the officer, 
as he helped Bill adjust his silk tile. 



CHAPTER. VI. 




FULL thirty days after Swiftwater 
and Hathaway had left Seattle, 
following the affair on the decks 
of the steamer "Humboldt/' 
found the miner and his friend in 
Skagway. It was in the height of 
the spring rush to the gold fields, 
and there are undoubtedly few, if any, living todaj^ 
Avho wdll ever witness on this continent such scenes 
as were enacted on the terrible Skagway trail over 
the Coast Range of the Alaska mountains, which 
separated 50,000 eager, struggling, quarreling, fren- 
zied men and women drawn thither by the mad rush 
for gold from the upper reaches of the Yukon River 
and the lakes which helped to form that mighty 
stream. 

No pen can adequately portray the bitter clash, 
and struggling, and turmoil— man against man, man 
against woman, woman against man, fist against 
fist, gun against gun, as this mob of gold-crazed 
human beings surged into . the vortex of the Yu- 
kon 's valley and found their way to the new Gol- 
eonda of the north. 

Skagway was a whirling, tumbling, seething 
whirlpool of humanity. Imagine the spectacle of 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 65 

a mob of 40,000 half-crazed human beings assembled 
at the foot of the almost impassable White Pass, 
with the thermometer 90 degrees in the shade at the 
foot of the range, and ten feet of snow on the Sum- 
mit, three miles away. Then picture to this, if you 
can, the innumerable crimes against humanity that 
broke out in this mob of half-crazy, fighting, excited, 
bewildered multitude of men and women. 

There was no rest in the town— no sleep— no time 
for meals— no time for repose— nothing but a mad 
scramble and the devil take the hindmost. 

There was one cheap, newly constructed frame 
hotel in Skagway and rooms were from $5 to $20 
a day. The only wharf of the town was packed 
fifty feet high with merchandise of every description 
— 65 per cent, canned provisions, flour and dried 
fruits and the rest of it hardware, mining tools and 
clothing for the prospectors. Teams of yelping, 
snarling, fighting malamutes added their cries to the 
eternally welling mass of sound. 

And Swiftwater was there. Almost the first face 
I saw as I entered the hotel was that of Gates. 

*'Mrs. Beebe," he said, ''let us forget bygones. 
In another day or two I would have been over the 
Summit with my outfit. It is lucky that I am here, 
because possibly I can help you in some way." 

I could do nothing more than listen to what 
Swiftwater said. There was no other hotel, or in- 



56 SWIP^T WATER BILL. 

deed any place in the town where I could get shelter 
for myself and my two girls. Knowing the black 
purpose in Swiftwater's heart, I watched my girls 
Bera and Blanche day and night. My ow^n gooa& 
were piled up unsheltered and unprotected on the 
beach. 

Swiftwater, with all his cunning, could not de- 
ceive me of his real intent, yet my own perplexities 
and troubles made it easy for him to keep me in 
constant fear of him. 

"Mrs. Beebe," he would say, "you can trust me 
absolutely. ' ' 

With that, Swiftwater's face would take on a 
smile as innocent as that of a babe. There was 
always the warm, soft clasp of the womanish hand 
—the low^ pitched voice of Swiftwater to keep it 
company. 

And now", as I remember how innocent Bera was, 
how girlish she looked, how confiding she was in 
me, yet never for a moment forgetting, perhaps, the 
lure of the gold studded gravel banks of Eldorado 
which Swiftwater held constantly before her, it 
seems to my mind that no woman can be wronged as 
deeply and as eternally as that woman whose daugh- 
ter is stolen from her through guile and soft deceit. 

We had been in Skagway but a trifle more than a 
week, when, one evening, returning to the hotel, I 
found my room empty and Bera missing. 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 57 

"I have gone with Swiftwater to Dawson, Mam- 
ma. He loves me and I love him." This was what 
Bera had written and left on her dresser. 

That was all. There was one chance only to pre- 
vent the kidnaping of Bera. That was for me to get 
to the lakes on the other side of the mountains, at 
the head of navigation on the Yukon and seek the 
aid of the Canadian mounted police. 

At White Horse, there w^as trace of Swiftwater 
and Bera, but they had twenty-four hours the start 
of me and, when I finally found that they had gone 
through to Dawson, I simply quit. 

Down the Upper Yukon there was a constant 
streamofbargeSjSmallboatsandrafts. Miles Canyon, 
with its madly rushing, white-capped waters, extend- 
ing over five miles of rock-ribbed river bed and sand 
bar, was scattered o'er with timbers, boards, boxes 
and casks containing the outfits and all the worldly 
possessions of scores of unfortunates. 

''On, on, and ever and eternally on, down the 
Yukon to Dawson !'' That was the cry in those days 
and it bore, as unresistingly and as mercilessly as the 
tide of the ocean carries the flotsam and jetsam of 
seacoast harbors, the brave and the strong, the weak 
and crippled, the wise and the foolish, in one in- 
choate mass of humanity to that magic spot where 
more gold lay underground waiting for the pick of 



58 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

the poverty-struck miner than the world had ever 
known of— ''The Klondike." 

All things finally come to an end. I was in Daw- 
son. At the little temporary dock on the Yukon's 
bank, stood Bera and Swiftwater. The miner did 
not wait till I landed from the little boat. He went 
lip the gang plank and grasped me in his arms. 

''Mrs, Beebe," he said, "w^e're married. Come 
with us to our cabin. "We are waiting for you, and 
dinner is on the table." 

Swiftwater during all that summer and winter in 
Dawson was the wery soul of chivalry and attention 
both to Bera and myself. There was nothing too 
good for us in the little market places at Dawson 
and a box of candy at $5 a box just to please Bera 
or to satisfy my own taste for sweetmeats was no 
more to Swiftwater than the average man spending 
a two-bit piece on the outside. 

As the spring broke up the river and then sum- 
mer took the place of spring in Dawson, the traders 
from the outside brought in supplies of fresh eggs, 
fresh oranges, lettuce, new onions— all the delica- 
cies greatly to be prized and more esteemed after a 
long winter than the rarest fruits and dainties of 
the States. 

When summer came, Dawson got its first shipment 
of new watermelons from the outside, Swiftwater 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 59 ] 



bought the first melon he could find and paid $40 in 
dust for it, and brought it home, simply to please 
Bera and to make his home that much happier. 




CHAPTER VII. 

YDRAULIC mining in the Klondike 
country, by the time that Swiftwater 
had assembled his big outfit on Quartz 
Creek was in its very infancy, yet there 
were plenty of wise men in Dawson who 
knew that the tens of thousands of 
acres of hillside slopes and old abandoned creek 
beds would some day produce more gold when 
washed into sluice boxes with gigantic rams, than 
the native miner and prospector had been able to 
show, even with the figures, $50,000,000, output to 
his credit. 

The Canadian government had given Swiftwater 
and his partner, Joe Boyle, a princely fortune 
in the three mile concession on Quartz Creek. So 
great was the reputation of Swiftwater Bill— so 
intimately was his name linked with the idea of im- 
mense quantities of gold— and so high was his 
standing as a practical miner, that Swiftwater was 
able to borrow money right and left to carry on his 
work on Quartz Creek. Thus it was that before 
anybody could realize it, including myself, Swift- 
water's financial standing actually was $100,000 
worse off than nothing. This was about the amount 
of money that he used and in that tid}^ sum was all 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 61 

the savings of my winter in Dawson and my divi- 
dends from my hotel, which aggregated at least 
$35,000. 

"When Joe comes in this spring from London," 
said Swiftwater to me, "we'll have all the money we 
want and more, too, Mrs. Beebe. He has cabled 
tAvice to Seattle that our money is all raised and we 
will have a million-dollar clean-up on Quartz Creek 
this fall." 

As the sprinsj came on and reports from the 
mines on Quartz Creek became brighter^ Swiftwater 
became more enthusiastic and confident. The fact 
that his creditors were beginning to worry, and that 
there is a nasty law in Canada which affects debtors 
who seek to leave the country in a restraining way, 
did not seriously worry Swiftwater. He seemed to 
think more of the coming of his child than any- 
thing else, next to the^work on Quartz Creek. 

"That baby is going to be born on Quartz Creek, 
Mrs. B— " Swiftwater said. "It is my determina- 
tion that my first child shall be born where I will 
make a greater fortune than anybody hereabouts." 

I told Swiftwater that he was talking arrant non- 
sense. 

"It would be the death of Bera in her condition," 
said I, "for her to take the trip up there in this cold, 
nasty weather, with the roads more like swamps 
than anvthino" else and the hills still covered with 



62 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

snow. More than that, there are doctors here in 
Dawson and on Quartz Creek we would be thirty 
miles from the nearest human settlement." 

But nothing would deter Swiftwater. He set 
about rigging up a big sled which could be pulled 
by two horses. It was made of heavy oaken 
timber, and the long low bed was filled with 
furs, blankets, bedding, etc. Swiftwater went 
to Dr. Marshall, our physician, when all ar- 
rangements had been practically completed for the 
journey to Quartz. He had effectually stopped my 
protests before he said to Dr. Marshall : 

'^I will give you $2,000 or more, if necessary, to 
take six weeks off and go with me up to Quartz 
Creek where my child will be born. Just name your 
figure if that is not enough." 

Bera was seventeen years old, immature and deli- 
cate, yet brave and strong, and willing to imperil 
her own life to gratify Swiftwater 's whim. So it 
finally came about that I was delegated to do the 
final shopping in advance of our journey. 

I went to Gandolfo's and bought with my own 
money a case of oranges and a crate of apples. Each 
orange cost $3 in dust and the apples about the same. 
Next I ordered a barrel of bottled beer, for Swift- 
water wanted to treat his men with a feast when the 
babv was born and the bottled beer was what he 




BERA BEEBE GATES 
From a photograph taken at Washington, D. C, where she 
was deserted by Swiftwater Bill. 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 63 

Ihought to be the proper thing. The barrel of beer 
cost me close to $500 in gold. 

All this stuff was loaded on the sled. They started 
over the twenty-eight miles of crooked, winding, 
marshy trail to Quartz Creek. The journey was 
something terrible. The days were short and the 
wind from the hills and gulches was wet with the 
thawing of the snow and so cold that it seemed to 
make icicles of the drippings from the trees. Bera, 
wrapped a foot thick in furs, seemed to stand the 
trip all right, and in due time the baby was born 
and christened. 

There was great rejoicing in the camp and Swift- 
water weighed out $3,000 in dust to Dr. Marshall 
and sent him back to Dawson. A month afterwards 
one of our men brought from Dawson the word that 
the mail had arrived over the ice, but Swiftwater 
looked in vain for a letter from Joe Boyle. He 
had confidently expected a draft for $50,000. 

For two days SAviftwater scarcely spoke. The 
cabin in which we lived was only a quarter of a mile 
from the nearest dump where the men were working. 
I used to go out every once in a while and take up a 
few shovels full of gravel which would wash out be- 
tween $5 and $10 and if I had had the good common 
sense which comes only after years of hard knocks 
in this troublesome world, I could then and there 



64 SWIFTWATBR BILL. 

have protected myself against the bitter misfortunes 
which came to me in a few months afterwards. 

I was washing some of the baby's clothes in the 
kitchen and drying them on a line over the fire, 
when Swiftwater came in from the diggings, clad 
in his rubber boots which reached to his hips. 

The miner asked for some hot water and a towel 
and began to shave the three weeks' black growth 
from his chin. 

"What are you going to do now, Swiftwater?" I 
asked. 

''I'm going do^^rn to town." 

For two days the cabin had been without food ex- 
cept some mush and a few dried potatoes and a can 
of condensed milk for the baby. Sv/iftwater had 
sent a man over the trail to Dawson for food two 
days before. 

''You'll not go without Bera ! You are not going 
to leave us here to starve," said I. 

"Bera cannot possibly go," said Bill. 

I turned and Avent to Bera's room and told her to 
dress immediately. Then I washed the baby, piit an 
entire new change of clothes on him, wrapped up 
his freshly ironed garments in a package, got a bot- 
tle of soothing syrup and a can of condensed milk. 

It was always my belief and is now, that Swift- 
water's mind contained a plan to abandon Bera, the 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 65 

baby and me, and to run away from the Yukon to 
escape his troubles. 

We got a small boat and filled one end of it with 
fir boughs, covered them over with rugs, and put 
Bera and the baby there. Then Sw^iftwater and I 
got in the boat and pushed off down stream. 

Swiftwater confessed to me for the first time 
that he was in serious trouble. 

"There have been three strange men from Daw^- 
son out here on our claims," said Swiftwater, "and 
I know who sent them out. They are watching me." 

As I look back upon that awful trip down Indian 
River, with poor, wan, white-faced Bera hug- 
ging the little three v/eeks' old baby to her bosom, so 
sick that she could hardly talk, I wonder if there 
is any hardship, and peril, and privation, and suf- 
fering, a woman cannot endure. 

The boat w^as heavy— terribly heavy. In the small 
stretches of still water it was desperately hard, 
bone-racking toil to keep moving. 

In the rushes of the river, where rapids tore at 
mill-race speed over boulders and pebbly stretches, 
we were constantly in danger of being upset. An 
hour of this sort of work made me almost ready 
for any sort of fate. 

Finally we struck a big rock and the current 
carried us on a stretch of sandy beach. Sw^iftwater 
and I got out and waded up to our armpits in the 



66 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

cold stream to get the boat started again. Then 
we climbed aboard and once more shot down the 
rocky canyon to another stretch of still water be- 
yond. IBy nightfall we had reached an old cabin 
half way to Dawson, in which the fall before Swift- 
water had cached provisions. The baby's food was 
all gone, and Bera, in a tit of anger, had thrown 
what little bread and butter sandwiches we had 
put up for ourselves, overboard. I had not eaten 
all day, nor had Swiftwater. 

It was growing dusk when we painfully pulled 
the boat on the bank at SwiftAvater's cache. Gates 
went inside to get some grub and prepared to build 
a fire. He came out a moment later, his face ashy 
pale, his eyes downcast. 

"They have stolen all I had put in here," he said. 

It seemed to me that night as if the very limit of 
human misery on this earth was my bitter portion 
as we waited all through the weary hours in the 
cabin huddled before a little fire, waiting (it is light 
all the time in summer) to resume our journey to 
Dawson. 

The next day we reached Dawson shortly after 
noon, famished, cold, and completely exhausted. I 
actually believe the baby would have died ])ut for 
the bottle of soothing syrup and water which I had 
brought along. 

Swiftwater took us to the Fairview Hotel and sent 
for the doctor for Bera and the baby. 




CHAFrER VIIL 

THE people of Dawson, in those days, 
starving through weary winter 
months for want of frequent mail com- 
munication wiitli tjie civilized world, 
and hungering for the ebb and flow of 
human tide that is a natural and daily part of the 
lives of those in more fortunate places, the arrival 
of the first steamer from "the outside" in the spring 
is an event even greater than a Fourth of July cele- 
bration to a country tow^n in Kansas. 

For days before our arrival down Indian River 
from Quartz Creek, the men and women of Daw^son 
had eagerly discussed the probability of the com- 
ing of the Yukoner, the regular river liner from 
White Horse due any moment, with fresh provi- 
sions from Seattle and the first papers and letters 
from ''the outside." 

For two days after Sw^ftwater had taken Bera to 
the Fairview Hotel, the doctor had cared for her so 
as to enable her to recover from the hardships of 
the trip down Indian River. I took the baby to my 
own rooms and carefuly nursed him through all one 
day. This brought him quickly round, and he soon 
looked as bright and cheerful as a new twenty 
dollar gold piece. 



68 SWIP'TWATER BILL. 

It was on the third morning after we arrived in 
Dawson that the steamer Yukoner's whistle sound- 
ed up the river, and the whole populace rushed to 
the wharves and river banks. Miners came from all 
points up the creeks to welcome friends or to get 
their mail that the Yukoner had brought. The little 
shopkeepers in Dawson, particularly the fruit vend- 
ers, were extremely active, bustling amongst the 
crowd on the dock and fighting their way to get 
the first shipments of early vegetables, fruits, fresh 
eggs, fresh butter and other perishable commodities 
for which Dawson hungered. 

But Swiftwater, keen eyed, nervous, straining, 
yet trying to be composed, saw none of this, nor 
felt the least interest in the tide of newcomers who 
stepped from the Yukoner's decks and made their 
w^ay up town surrounded by friends. 

Swiftwater was looking for one face in the crowed 
—that of his partner, Joe Boyle, Avho had prom- 
ised to bring him $100,000 from London, w^here the 
big concession on Quartz Creek had been bonded for 
$250,000. 

Swiftwater stood at the gang plank and eagerly 
scanned every face until the last man had come 
ashore and only the deck hands remained on board. 

''There is certainly a letter in the mail, anyhow," 
said Swiftwater. 

For the first time in all of this miserable experi- 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 69 

ence I realized that a heavy burden was on SAvifu- 
water's shoulders— a load that was crushing the 
heart and brain of him— and that would, unless re- 
lieved, destroy all of the man's native capacity to 
handle his tangled affairs, even under the most un- 
favorable circumstances. 

I decided to watch SAviftwater very closely. I 
noticed that he was not to be seen around town in 
his usual haunts. I did not dare ask him if he 
feared arrest, for that would show that I knew 
that his crisis had come. 

Two hours after the Yukoner's mail was in the 
postoffice, Swiftwater came to my room. 

''There is no letter from Joe," was all he said. 

I made no reply except to say : 

"Have you told Bera?" 

"No, and I'm not going to — now, " said Swift- 
water and then left the room. 

Swiftwater had between $35,000 and $40,000 of 
my money in his Quartz Creek concession. I had 
felt absoluteh^ secure for the reason that if the prop- 
erty was well handled my interest should be worth 
from $100,000 to $250,000. jMy faith in the property 
has been justified by subsequent events, as all well 
informed Dawson mining men will testify. 

But the want of money was bitter and keen at 
that moment. Yet I scarcely know what to advise 
Swiftwater to do. 



70 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

Gates and Bera came to my rooms after dinner 
that night. 

''Will this help you pay a few pressing little 
bills?" asked S^viftwater, as he threw two fifty 
dollar paper notes in my lap. 

"My God, Swiftwater, can't you spare any more 
than $100?" I gasped. 

"Oh, that's just for now— I'll give you plenty 
more tomorrow," said he. 

As they arose to go, Bera kissed me on the mouth 
and cheek with her arms around my neck. 

"You love the baby, don't you mama?" said 
Bera, and I saw then, without seeing, and came 
afterwards to know that there were tears in Bera's 
eyes and a smile dewy with affection on her lips. 

Swiftwater put his arm around me and kissed me 
'•n the forehead 

"We'll be over early for you for breakfast to- 
morrow," said Swiftwater as they went down the 
stairs. 

Holding the baby in my arms at the window, I 
watched SwiftAvater and Bera go do^vn the street, 
Bera turning now and again to wave her hand and 
throw a kiss to me, Swiftwater lifting his hat. 

Now, what I am about to relate may seem almost 
incredible to any normal human mind and heart : 
and especially so to those thousands of Alaskans 
who knew SwiftAvater in the early days to be jolly. 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 71 

though impractical, yet always generous, whole- 
souled, brave and honest. 

An hour after Swiftwater and Bera had gone, 
there was a knock at my door. I opened it and there 
stood Phil Wilson -an old associate and friend 
of Swiftwater 's. 

'^s Bill Gates here?" asked Wilson. 

''Why, no," said I. "They went over an hour 

ago." 

"Thank you," said he, and lumbered heav- 

ilv down the stairs. 

'The next morning I waited until 11 o'clock for 
Swiftwater and Bera to come for me to go to 
breakfast. I had slept little or none the night 
before and my nerves were worn down to the fin© 
edge that comes just before a total collapse. 

When it seemed as if I could not wait longer, 
there came a knock at the door. 

When I opened the door there stood George 
Taylor, a friend of Swiftwater 's of some years' 

standing. 

"Mrs. Beebe, I came to tell you that Swiftwater 
and Bera left early this morning to go to Quartz 
Creek on horseback. I promised Swiftwater I would 
help you move to his cabin and get everything ready 
for their return on Saturday." 

"In Heaven's name, what is Swiftwater trying 
to do-kill Bera?" I exclaimed. "That ride to 



72 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

Quartz Creek in her condition, through the mud 
and mire of that trail, will kill her." 

Taylor merely looked at me and did not answer. 

"Are you telling me the truth?" I demanded. 

"I am," he said. 

Taylor walked away and I closed the door and 
went back to the baby. 

''Baby," said I, "I guess we're left all alone for 
a while and you haven't any mama but me." 

Although I afterward learned of the fact, it did 
me no good at that trying moment that Swiftwater 
had told Bera, before she would consent to leave 
me, that he had sent me $800 in currency by Wilson. 
Of course, Swiftwater did nothing of the kind, yet 
his story was such as to lead Bera to believe that I 
was well protected and comfortable. 

Then I set to work to move my little belongings 
into Swiftwater 's cabin, there to wait for four days 
hoping that every minute would bring some word 
from Bera and Gates. There was little to 
eat in the cabin and the $100 that Swiftwater had 
given me had nearly all gone for baby's necessities. 
The little fellow had kept up Avell and strong in 
spite of everything, and when I undressed him at 
night and bathed him and got him ready for his 
bed, he seemed so brave and strong and sweet that 
I could not, for the life of me, give wav to the 



" _ SWIFTWATER BILL. 73 

feeling of desolation and loss that my circumstances 
warranted. 

On the third day after Bera and Swiftwater had 
gone and I was getting a little supper for the baby 
and myself in the cabin, there came a clatter of 
heavy boots on the gravel walk in front of the 
house and a boisterous knock on the door. 

Jumping up from the kitchen table, I nearly' ran 
to the door, believing that Bera and Swiftwater 
were there. Instead there stood a messenger from 
the ]\IcDonald Hotel in Dawson with a letter for me. 
It simply said : 

''We have gone down the river in a small boat 
to Nome with ]\Ir. Wilson. I will send you money 
immediately on arrival there, so that you can join 
us. SWIFTWATER." 

That was all. 

I read the letter through again and then the 
horror of it came over me— I all alone in Dawson 
with Swiftwater 's four weeks' old baby, broke and 
he owing me nearly $40,000. 

Then everything seemed to leave me and I fell 
to the floor unconscious. Hours afterward— they 
said it was 9 o'clock at night, and the messenger 
had been there at 4 in the afternoon— I came to. 
The baby was crying and hungry. It seemed to 
me I had been in a long sickness and I could not 



74 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

for a while quite realize where I was or what ill 
shape of a hostile fate had befallen me. And, when 
I think of it now, it seems to me any other woman in 
my place would have gone crazy. 

For two months I stayed in that cabin, trying 
my best to find a way out of Dawson and unable to 
move a rod because of the fact that I had no money. 
Swiftwater, as I learned afterwards, took a lay on 
a claim on Dexter Creek and cleaned up in a short 
time $4,000. 

When I heard this, I wrote to him for money for 
the baby, but none came. 

A month passed and then another and no word 
from Swiftwater. I felt as long as I had a roof 
over my head, I could make a living for myself and 
the baby by working at anything— manicuring, hair- 
dressing or sewing. Then, one evening, .just after 
I had finished dinner, came a rap at the door. 

It w^as Phil Wilson, 

''Swiftwater has given me a deed to this house 
and power of attorney over his other matters," 
said he. "I shall move my things over here and 
occupy one of these three rooms." 

I knew better than to make any objection then, 
but the next day I told Wilson: 

''You will have to take j^our things down town — 
you cannot stay here." 

*'I guess I'll stay all right, Mrs. Beebe," said he. 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 75 

"And it will be all winter, too. And, I think it 
would be better for you, Mrs. Beebe, if you stayed 
here with me." 

I knew just what that meant. I said: 

''Mr. Wilson, I understand you, but you will go 
and take your things now." 

Wilson left in another minute and I did not see 
him for two days. On the second afternoon I locked 
the door with a padlock and went down town to do 
some shopping for the baby, who I had left with a 
neighbor. I also wanted to send a fourth letter to 
Swiftwater, begging him to send me some money 
to keep me and his baby from starving. 

When I got back at dusk that evening, the door 
to the cabin was broken open, and the chain and 
padlock lay on the ground shattered into fragments. 

I went inside. All mj^ clothes, the baby's and 
even the little personal belongings of the child were 
piled together in a disordered heap in the center 
room. 




CHAPTER IX. 

T WAS pitch dark when I left the cabin and 
made my way directly, as best I could, to 
the town with its dimly lighted streets. It 
seemed to me that I had never had a friend 
in all this world. Friend? Yes, FRIEND. That 
is to say— a human being who could be depended 
upon in any emergency and who was right— right 
all the time in fair as Avell as in foul Aveather. 

There was only one thought in my mind— that 
was to find some man or woman in all that coiii^try 
to whom I could go for shelter and for aid. I knew 
naught of Swiftwater and Bera, except that they 
had left me. Swiftwater 's child, I felt as if he 
was my own— that little babe smiling up into my 
face as I had held him in my arms but a few minutes 
before, seemed to me as if he was my own. 

I knew instinctively that there was none in all 
that multitude of carefree or careworn miners who 
thronged the three cafes and the dance halls of Daw- 
son who could do much, if anything, to help me. 

Past the dance halls and saloons and gambling 
halls of Dawson I went my way, down beyond the 
town and finallv found the dark trail that led to 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 77 

the barracks of the mounted police. I told the cap- 
tain exactly what had happened. I said : 

''Captain, I am left all alone here by Swiftwater 
Bill and I have to find some place to shelter his 
little two months' old child and to feed and 
clothe him. He told me to live in his cabin. But 
I have no home there now as long as that man Wil- 
son lives there." 

No woman who has never known the hard and 
seamy side of life in Dawson can possibly under- 
stand how g-ood are the mounted police to every 
human being, man, woman or child, who is in 
trouble without fault of their own. The captain 
said: 

"Mrs. Beebe, I have long known of you, and I 
do not doubt that a wrong has been done you. 
You aud your little grandson shall not suffer for 
want of shelter or food tonight." 

With that the captain detailed two officers with 
instructions to accompany me to Swiftwater 's cabin 
and to see that I was comfortably and safely housed 
there, no matter what the circumstances. We went 
back that long, dark way, a mile over the trail to 
the cabin. When we arrived there, the two officers 
went inside. 

"Place this woman's clothes and belongings 
where they were before you came in here, and do 
it at once," commanded one of the mounted police. 



78 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

Wilson looked at me in amazement, and then his 
face was flushed with an angry glow as he saw that 
the two officers meant business. 

Without a word, he picked up all the baby's 
clothes and my own and put them back where they 
had been before. Then he took his pack of clothes 
and belongings and left without a word. 

It would merely encumber my story to tell how 
I was summoned into court by Phil Wilson, and 
how the . judge, after hearing my story of Swift- 
water's brutality— of his leaving me in Dawson 
penniless with his baby— said that he could hardly 
conceive how a man could be so inhuman as Swift- 
water was, to leave the unprotected mother of his 
wife and his baby alone in such a place as Dawson 
and in such hands as those of the man who stood 
before him. He said that such brutality, in his 
judgment, was without parallel in Dawson's annals 
and that, while he felt the deepest sympathy for me, 
left as I had been helpless and with Swiftwater's 
baby, yet the law gave Phil Wilson the right to 
the cabin. 

This ended the case. I turned to go from the 
courtroom Avhen the Presbyterian minister. Dr. ]\Ic- 
Kenzie, came to me and said : 

"Mrs. Beebe, I do not know anything about the 
circumstances that have brought vou to this con- 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 79 

clition, but if 3'ou will let me have the child I will 
see that he has a good home and is well cared for." 

But this was not necessary, as it turned out after- 
v,^ards, because Dr. McKenzie took the matter up 
with the council, where it w^as threshed out in all 
its details. The council voted $125 a month for 
sustenance for the nurse and the baby. The mounted 
police took me to the barracks and there provided 
a cabin and food, with regular supplies of provisions 
from the canteen. , 

I do not doubt but that the monthly expense 
during the winter that I lived there with the baby 
is still a matter of record in Dawson in the archives 
of the government, and I am equally certain that, 
although Sw^iftwater Bill has made hundreds of 
thousands of dollars since that day and is now rep^ 
uted to be worth close to $1,000,000, he has never 
liquidated the debt he owes to the Canadian govern- 
ment for the care and sustenance and shelter they 
gave his o\^ti boy. All of the facts stated in this 
chapter can easily be verified by recourse to the 
records of the court and mounted police in Dawson. 

Although I knew that Swiftwater was making 
money in Nome, I placed no more dependence in 
him from that moment and managed to sustain 
myself by manicuring and hairdressing in Dawson. 

The winter wore away, and there was the usual 
annual celebration of the coming of spring with 



80 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

its steamers from White Horse laden with the first 
papers and the mail from the outside. In May of 
that year I received a telegram from Swiftwater 
Bill telling me to leave Dawson on the first boat 
and come down the river to Nome, as he and Bera 
would be there on the first boat from Seattle. The 
day after I received the telegram the mail came 
and brought a letter written b}" Swiftwater from 
Chicago, saying that he had the money to pay me 
all he owed me and more too, and for me not to 
fail to meet him and Bera in Nome. 

Isn't it curious how a woman Avill forget all the 
injustice she suffers at the hands of a man, when 
it seems to her that he is trying to do and is doing 
the right thing? 

Does it seem odd to 3^ou, my woman reader, that 
the thought of meeting Bera again and of giving 
to her and to Swiftwater the custody of the dear 
little child I had loved and nursed all winter long. 
should have appealed to me ? 

And now, as there must be an end to the hardest 
luck story— just as there is a finish at some time 
to all forms of human grief and sorrow— so there 
came an end to that winter in the little cabin near 
the mounted police barracks at Dawson, where baby 
and I and the nurse, Lena Hubbell, had spent so 
manv weeks waiting for a change in our luck. 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 81 

Again there was a mob of evpry Vind of people 
in Dawson, 

On the first steamer leaving Dawson I went with 
the child, after giving up a good business that 
netted me between $200 and $300 a month. I took 
the nurse girl with me — who had been in unfortu- 
nate circumstances in Dawson — and I speak of her 
now, as she figures prominentl}" in another chapter 
in this book. 

It matters little now that Swiftwater could have 
provided handsomely for me and the child— that he 
took the money that he made from his lay on Dexter 
Creek and spent it gambling at Nome ; and thai 
Bera, knowing my circumstances, took from a sluice 
box on his claim enough gold to exchange for $500 
in bills at Nome, to send to me. 

And when I think of this my blood boils, for 
Bera, after she had the $500 in bills wrapped in a 
piece of paper and sealed up in an envelope ad- 
dressed to me, met Swiftwater on the street in 
Nome and he took the money away from her, 
saying : 

"Bera, I'll mail that letter to your mother." 

Of course, I never got the money because Swift- 
water gambled it away, and I laying awake nights 
crying and unable to sleep because of my worry, 
and working hard throughout the long winter days 
to support Swiftwater 's child. 



82 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

So it came about that we boarded the big river 
steamer Susie for Nome. Her decks -were jammed 
with people eager to get outside or anxious to try 
their fortunes in the new Seward Peninsula gold 
fields or the beach diggings at Nome. The Yukon 
was clear of ice, wide, deep and beautiful to look 
upon in summer, though in winter, when the ice is 
packed up one hundred feet high, it carries the 
death dealing blizzards that bring an untimely fate 
to many a hardy traveler. 

In Nome I found no further news of Swift water 
nor Bera and waited there for three weeks. Then, 
after days of watching at the postoffice, I got a 
letter from Swiftwater, saying that it would not be 
possible for him to come to Nome, and there was 
not even so much as a dollar bill in the letter. 

Disheartened and miserable, I turned to go back 
to my hotel. As I turned from the postoffice a news- 
boy rushed up from the wharf, crying out : 

"SEATTLE TIMES- ALL ABOUT SV7IFT- 
WATER BILL RUNNING AWAY WITH AN- 
OTHER WOMAN." 



CHAPTER X. 




S I write this chapter, which is to interest 
not only the friends and acquaintances of 
Swiftwater Bill, but which also may throw 
a new^ light on his character, and may 
even arouse a general interest in the odd 
freaks of human nature which one finds 
in the northern country, I am moved to wonder 
whether or not there is a human pen capable of por- 
trajdng all of the many-sided phases of Swiftwater 's 
nature. The story in the Seattle paper merely gave 
an outline of Swiftwater 's escapade, when he ran 
away with Kitty Brandon, took her from Portland 
to Seattle and back to Chehalis and there married 
her on June 20th, 1901. 

If Swiftwater Bill's title as the Don Juan of 
the Klondike had ever been questioned before this 
affair, it seems to me that his elopement with Kitty 
Brandon from Portland early in June of that year 
would have forever settled the matter in his favor. 
The Seattle paper merely told that Swiftwater and 
Kitty had been married, against the will and wish 
of her mother at Chehalis, and that the girl's mother 
learning of the affair had followed the lovers to 
Seattle. 

Kitty was a fragile, neatly formed girl of fifteen 
years, when she Avent to St. Helen's Hall in Portland 



84 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

as a student. Swiftwater left Bera in the sprin5> 
of that year at Washington, D. C, and hurried 
across the continent, intending, as he told me in all 
his letters, on making another fortune^ in Alaska. 
He had valuable interests in the gold mining district 
near Teller, Alaska, and in his fond imagination 
there was everj^ reason to believe that the Kougarok 
country was as rich, if not richer, than Eldorado 
and Bonanza in the Klondike. 

"Bring my baby down to Nome and meet me 
at Teller," Swiftwater wrote me. "I am so glad 
you have taken such good care of my darling son 
all winter in Dawson. I shall pay you all that 
you have loaned me and I will see that you make 
more money in Teller City than you ever made in 
Dawson. I could hug and kiss you for taking such 
good care of our baby boy." 

Such w^as the language of Swiftwater 's letters to 
me, written in Washington in the spring of that 
year. Swiftwater reasoned that all of Alaska is 
underlaid with gold; that the fabulous riches of 
Eldorado and Bonanza would be duplicated again 
and again on Seward peninsula. To his mind, the 
making of a fortune of a million of dollars in a 
summer in the new diggings near Teller was one 
of the simplest things in the world, and it is not to 
be wondered at that there were hundreds among 
/lis friends who believed then and do now that his 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 85 

mining judgment and fairy-like luck were such as 
to enable him to go forth into the north at any 
time and bring out hundreds of thousands of dol- 
lars in the precious yelloAv stuff. 

Be that as it may, when Swiftwater reached the 
coast, he happened by ill chance to stop at Port- 
land. In St. Helen's Hall there was Kitty Brandon, 
known as his niece, a girl of more than ordinary 
mental and physical charms. Once again the amor- 
ous nature of Swiftwater Bill asserted itself. It 
is related that he called at St. Helen's Hall and 
interviewed Kitty Brandon, and then after that was 
a frequent visitor, taking Kitty at odd times driving 
through the beautiful city of Portland or entertain- 
ing her at lunch or dinner, as the case might be, in 
Portland's sw^ell cafes. 

That Swiftwater had no plans for his immediale 
future can well be believed when it is know^n that 
after a few days of courtship of Kitty Brandon, 
he eloped with the little girl and came to Seattle. 
On the way to Seattle Kitty and Swiftwater vrere 
married at Chehalis. 

It is not surprising that Swiftwater found his 
last love affair anything but a summer holiday, 
when it is remembered that his legal wife, Bera, was 
in Washington, U. C, awaiting his return. Consid- 
erations of propriety and, even of the law, seemed 



86 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

to have left Swiftwater's mind entirely, until Kitty's 
mother learned of his elopement and followed the 
lovins: pair to Seattle. 

What followed afterwards was told in the Seattle, 
Tacoma and Portland newspapers of that time. 
Learning that Swiftwater and Kitty were registered 
as man and wife at a Seattle hotel, Kitty's mother 
followed them and sought to apprehend them. Then 
it was that Swiftwater evinced that capacity for re- 
source and tact which, as all his friends know, is 
one of his most distinguished characteristics. 

With the irate mother of his newest love lying 
in wait at night in the lobby of one of Seattle's 
best known hotels, it was Swiftwater's task to show 
that skill in maneuver and celerity in action which 
tens of thousands of Northerners attributed to him 
as the origin of his odd nick-name. There was no 
time to repent for his infatuation for the pretty 
Kitty Brandon, or to remember the fate of his de- 
serted wife and child in Washington. 

And Swiftwater was equal to the emergency. 
Bidding Kitty's mother wait in the hotel parlor, 
Swiftwater rushed to his room, telephoned for a 
hack to come to the rear of the hostelry, and in less 
than ten minutes Bill and his sweetheart were being 
driven at breakneck speed through the streets of 
Seattle, southward over the bridge across the tide 
flats, headed for Tacoma. It was told by Swiftwater 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 



87 




ESCAPE AT NIGHT OF SWIFTWATER AND KITTY 
BRANDON FROM THE GIRL'S IRATE MOTHER. 



88 SWIFT WATER BILL. 

afterwards that in nearly every mile of that trip 
fear that Kitty's mother was pursuing liim and his 
inamorita folloAved him and for the greater part of 
the way he kept watching down the dark road in the 
rear of his hack, expecting that at every turn of 
the road the wrathful parent would be in sight in 
readiness to pounce upon him. 

From Tacoma, where Swiftwater and Kitty found 
only temporary shelter, the runaway pair escaped to 
Portland, to return to Seattle and spend their honey- 
moon in a little cottage in an obscure district r.ear 
Interbay. 



E 



CHAPTER XL 

3 I look back on that day in Nome and re- 
call the sensation created in the little min- 
ing camp when the paper containing the 
story of Swiftwater's perfidy was circu- 
lated abroad among the people, I am tempted 
to wonder if the duplicate or parallel of 
Swiftwater's enormities at this time can be found 
in all the annals of this great Northwestern coun- 
try. The Times' story seemed, even to those like 
myself, who knew something of Swiftwater's char- 
acter, to be almost incredible, and for my part it 
was several hours before I realized, in a dumb un- 
feeling sort of a way, that Swiftwater had abso- 
lutely stolen his own sister's child— Kitty Brandon 
— a girl not more than sixteen years old, had eloped 
with her, committed bigamy by marrying her in 
Chchalis, Wash., and at the same time had deserted 
his wife and left her penniless in Washington, D. C. 

It was long after nightfall as I sat in my room, 
the baby sound asleep in his little crib, the nurse 
gone for the night, and I had read The Times' 
story about Swiftwater and Kitty over the twentieth 
time, that I felt the real force of the shame and 
scandal which the miner had placed about himself 
and Bera, and which did not even leave me and my 



90 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

little grandson, Clifford, outside of its dark and 
forbidding pall. 

All that night I lay awake and wondered how in 
Heaven's name I could get word to Bera— or if she 
had received a telegram from friends in Seattle 
and the blow had killed her— or whether she was 
then on her way West, or whatever fate had befallen 
her. 

I knew little about Swiftwater's business affairs 
just at that time except that he had .gone to Wash- 
ington in the hope of furthering his mining ventures 
in the North and had taken Bera with him. Then 
I remembered that in his letters to me and tele- 
grams urging me to join him at Nome he had 
spoken about having raised considerable money and 
was able to pay his debt to me and lift me out of 
the mire of toil and drudgery in Alaska, in which 
I had sojourned for so many months. 

All that night I neither slept nor rested. It 
seemed to me at times as if my head would split 
into a thousand pieces with the thought of Swift- 
water's treachery to Bera and myself. Then I 
realized the utter futility and helplessness of a 
woman situated as I was in Nome, absolutely un- 
able to get a telegram or quick letter to Bera or to 
hear from her telling me of her condition. For 
aught I knew, she might have been deathly sick, 
cared for onlv bv strangers or left destitute at 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 91 

some place in the East and without any means 
whatever of righting herself. 

It seems to me, now when I think of that all 
night's vigil in the little hotel in Nome, that Provi- 
dence must have been watching over me, that I did 
not lose my reason. At last I found that unless I 
went to work doing something, I would sure go 
crazy, and then I started to get work, first borrow- 
ing some money, which I sent out b}^ mail the next 
day to Bera at her last address. 

While I worked and slaved in Nome trying to 
get a few dollars ahead so that I could care for 
the baby and make my way out to Seattle to help 
Bera, I finally got word that she had been left 
destitute in Washington, D. C. Swiftwater had 
furnished four nice rooms in an apartment house 
at Washington, and in their effects was more than 
$1,000 worth of rare curios and ivory from 
Alaska. Then came another letter that Bera, un- 
able to pay for her care, food and medical atten- 
tion—the second baby bo}^ was born August 28th— 
had been put on board a train with a charity ticket, 
her ivories and curios sold for a trifle and had 
been started West for Seattle. 

I need not dwell on how Bera, more dead than 
alive from five days traveling in a chair car from 
Washington to Seattle with her babe at her bosom 
and unable to sleep at all — with nothing to eat but 



92 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

a few sandwiches which they had given her at 
Washington— arrived in Seattle and was cared for 
by friends. 

They took the girl, so weak she could hardly 
stand on her feet, to a restaurant and gave her her 
first hot meal in almost a week. Tht^n Bera and her 
baby went to Portland to live with her grandma, 
while Swiftwater and Kitty Gates were touring 
the country. 

And do you know that Swiftwater 's polygamous 
wife, Kitty Gates, was the girl who Bera one year 
before had fitted out with a nice outfit of clothes 
and had sent her to a convent school at Portland to 
be given a good education? 

Yes, this is the truth, and this yvas Kitty's grat- 
itude to Bera and Swiftwater 's crime against the 
law and his own flesh and blood. 

How we managed after I came to Seattle from 
Nome to live in a little room in a small old fash- 
ioned house on Fourth Avenue with barely enough 
to eat and scarcely enough clothes to cover our- 
selves need not be told here in detail. I sometimes 
wonder whether or not I have overladen my little 
narrative with grief and misery anu crime against 
humanity and against human laws, as well as God's. 
And then I wonder still more why it was that there 
were men in Seattle, in San Francisco and in Fair- 
banks in Ihose davs who were ahvays i-eadv to exalt 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 93 

! 

Swiftwater and do him honor and take him by the ' 

hand, while the world would look askance at Bera j 

Gates, his wife, whom he had so grieviously ) 

Avronged. j 




CHAPTER XII. 

WIFT WATER BILL GATES is back/' 
One morning in Seattle months 
after Bera and I had set up a little 
housekeeping establishment in Seat- 
tle, I picked up the Saturday evening 
edition of The Times and almost 
dropped over in my chair when I saw headlines in 
the paper as shoAvn in the foregoing. 

What had been Swiftwater Bill's fortune in all 
those months, I knew not, but the fact as stated in 
the paper that he had returned from Alaska was 
sufficient for me. 

Bera said: 'Mama, I don't know any reason why 
you should fuss around about Swiftwater." 

"Never mind me," said I, "I'll find him, my 
dear, just to see what he has to say for himself." 
Down to the Hotel Northern, then the Butler, 
the Rainier-Grand and the Stevens and all the rest 
I went and searched the registers without avail. As 
I remember now, it look me the greater part of a 
day to cover all the ground. 

Finally, by a curious chance I located Swiftwater 
at the Victoria Hotel. I waited until the next 
morning and then went to the Victoria and asked 
for Gates. 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 95 

Swiftwater, the clerk said, was out— had not been 
seen but once since his arrival. 

I am not going to say whether or not it was the 
humor of the situation or the bitter resentment I 
bore toward him that led me to tramp up three 
flights of stairs to the little parlor on the landing 
close to Swiftwater's room, and to Avait there ten 
hours at a stretch— until 1 :10 in the morning. Then 
I went home, only to return at 8 o'clock the next 
day, 

"Mr. Gates is in his room, but he is asleep," 
said the clerk. 

"I am Mrs. Beebe, his mother-in-law, and I want 
to see him now and I shall go direct to his room. 
You can go with me if you desire," said I. The 
little clerk scanned me carefully and then said, 
''Very well." We went upstairs together. 

The clerk rapped on. the door twice. There was 
no answer. 

"I guess he's out," said the boy. 

''Knock again— good and loud," I commanded. 

The boy rapped and just then the door opened a 
tiny way— about an inch, I guess, but through that 
little crack I saw the eye and part of the curling 
black moustache of Swiftwater Bill. 

Then I threw myself against the door and walked 
in. 

I wish I could tell vou how funny was Swift- 



96 



SWIFT WATER BILL. 




'COME OUT OF THAT, BILL! I HAVEN'T GOT A GUN. 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 97 

water's apparition, as, clad only in his Avhite night 
robe, he jumped into bed, pulling the covers over 
his head. 

This was the first time that Swiftwater had seen 
me since he left me in Dawson alone and unpro- 
tected, to find means as best I could to provide 
shelter and sustenance for his little baby boy, Clif- 
ford. 

In spite of myself, I laughed, forgetting all of tho 
long months that we had waited for some sign of 
Swiftwater and an indication of his desire to do 
what was right by his own two little babies. 

''Coward," I said, still laughing. "You know 
you deserve to be shot." 

No answer from Swiftwater, whose body was com- 
pletely covered up by bed clothes. 

Now, most men and most women will admire a 
]\IAN, but a cur and a coward are universally 
despised. 

As I looked at that huddled up mass of humanity 
underneath the white bedspread, my heart rose in 
rage. The contempt I felt for him is beyond all 
expression, 

"Come out of that, Bill," said T. "I have no 
gun ! ' ' 

After a while, Swiftwater poked his head from be- 
neath the bed clothes and showed a blanched face 
covered with a three weeks' old growth of black 



98 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

beard. I told him to dress and I would wait out- 
side. In a few minutes Swiftwat^r emerged and 
there stood a man who had commanded hundreds of 
thousands of dollars in money and gold in Alaska, 
looking just exactly as if he had dropped from the 
brake-beam of a Northern Pacific freight train and 
had walked his way into Seattle. He was clad in 
a dirty sack coat, that shone like a mirror, with 
brown striped trousers, an old brown derby hat 
and shoes that were out at the sole and side. 

''Mrs. Beebe," said Swiftwater in a trembling 
voice, "I am all in. If you will not have me ar- 
rested, but will give me a chance, I'll soon provide 
for the babies and Bera." 

Swiftwater pleaded as if for his life. He said 
that he could get money in San Francisco from a 
man who had offered to back him in a new scheme 
in the Tanana country. 

There was I with the two little boys and Bera 
all on my hands. I told Swiftwater that I would do 
nothing for him, but that I would forego having 
him put behind steel bars until I' had made up my 
mind just what course I should take. 

The next night, there was a knock at our door 
about 3 o'clock in the morning. Bera slept in the 
front room of our little two-room apartment and I 
in the other with the babies. I went to the door- 
there stood Swiftwater. 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 99 

''jMrs. Beebe," he said, ''I have no place to sleep 
tonight. If you will let me lie down on the floor, 
so that I can get a little sleep, I will get up early 
tomorrow morning and not bother you." 

I told Bera to come into my room and I let 
Swiftwater into the kitchen, where I gave him a 
comforter on which to lie. The next morning, after 
Bera had gone, I prepared Swiftwater 's breakfast. 
The man was in rags, almost. I made him take a bath, 
while I washed his underclothes, and then I went 
out and bought him. a new pair of socks and gave 
him money with Avhich to buy a new hat. 

The next day Swiftwater went to San Francisco 
on money I furnished him after I had pawned my 
diamonds with one of the best jewelry houses in 
Seattle. 

Why? Well, because Swiftwater had made me 
believe that he had another chance in the Tanana 
and that his friends in San Francisco, having faith 
in his judgment as a miner— whatever may be said 
of Swiftwater, he was known throughout the North 
as an expert miner— had raised a large sum with 
which to grubstake him. 

I will say this for Swiftwater: that he gave me 
a contract providing that he should pay what he 
owed me and give me an interest in such mines as 
he would locate in the Tanana country. And then 
he went awaj^ 




CHAPTER XIII. 

OIMETIMES, when I recall the stirring 
events in Swiftwater Bill's career, 
following the time he used the money 
I raised by pawning my diamonds 
and then went to California, I am 
tempted to wonder whether or not a 
man of his type of mental makeup ever realized 
that the hard bumps that he gets along the corduroy 
road of adversity are one and all of his own mak- 
ing. For, if one will but pause a moment and analyze 
the events in Swiftwater Bill's melodramatic career, 
the inevitable result comes to him, namely, that 
the bumps over which Swiftwater traveled during 
all of those years, when, one day he was worth a 
half million dollars in gold, and the next was hid- 
ing in all manner of dark and subterranean recesses 
in order to avoid deputy sheriffs and constables 
with writs and court processes, were placed there 
by his own hands and as skilfully and effectively as 
if he had deliberately planned to cause himself 
misery, 

Swiftwater 's transformation from a broken down 
tramp of the Weary AVillie order to a fine gentle- 
man and prosperous business man, w^th new tailor 
made clothes, patent leather shoes and his favored 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 101 

silk tile, was rapid after he got his hands on the 
money I borrowed from the jewelers, with my dia- 
monds as the pledge. The change in Swiftwater 
was simply marvelous. The day before almost, 
Swiftwater had stood before me, as I have told, 
without collar or tie, a dirty black growth of beard 
nearly an inch long on his unshaven chin and cheek, 
a dark frock coat of a nondescript shape that had 
seen better days and hung on Bill's frame as though 
it might have been loaned to him by some friend ; 
a pair of trousers of mediocre w^orkmanship and 
his feet almost sticking out of his shoes. 

Then picture Swiftwater ready to board the 
steamer for San Francisco, where his friend Marks 
was w^aiting to grubstake him to the tune of $18,000, 
jauntily wearing his polished beaver on the side 
of his head, his black moustaches curled and wav- 
ing in the breezes, his chin as smooth and immacu- 
late as an ivory billiard ball and his air and manner 
that of a man who had absolute confidence in him- 
self and his future. 

It is no wonder then, that w^hen S^vift water 
reached San Francisco outfitted as I have described, 
he found plenty of men, who, charmed by the 
magic of his description of the golden lure of the 
North and hypnotized into a state of enthusiasm by 
the halo of romance and river beds lined with gold 
nttaehod to Swiftwater 's name, Avere Avilling to 



102 SWIP'TWATER BILL. 

back him heavily for another venture in the North. 

By this time the Tanana District was becoming 
famous throughout the world and the town of Fair- 
banks had been located and Cleary had brought 
forth from the stream that bears his name thou- 
sands of dollars of virgin gold, thus proving beyond 
question the richness of the country. 

Now, I am ready to believe that most people will 
agree with me that Swiftwater was about as rapid 
and agile a performer as any of his contemporaries 
who occupy the hall of fame in the annals of 
Alaska. Because it was only a few short weeks 
until Swiftwater returns to Seattle with his pock- 
ets bulging with currency and prepared to leave for 
Fairbanks. 

Of course, I knew nothing of Swiftwater 's pres- 
ence in Seattle, though it had been only a few 
short weeks since I had, with my own hands, in 
the kitchen in the little two-room apartment we 
occupied, w^ashed his only suit of underclothes, so 
that he could go on the street without being an- 
noyed by the police. 

The first I knew of Swiftw^ater's return from San 
Francisco was when I read in the morning paper 
that ''W. C. Gates, the well known and opulent 
Alaska miner," had entertained a distinguished 
party of Seattle business men at a banquet at one 
of the bio' down town hotels. The cost of that feed. 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 103 

as I afterwards learned, was about $100— of Mr. 
Marks' money. Be that as it may, before I could 
find Swiftwater and gently recall to him the fact 
that his wife and two little children were almost 
in absolute want in Seattle he had managed to 
board a steamer for the Tanana and was off for the 
North. 

Now, when I found that Swiftwater had gone, I 
was frantic with the desire to follow him up to 
Alaska. For the year and a half that I had remained 
in Seattle, waiting like Micawber for something to 
turn up, the fever to get back to Alaska seemed to 
be growing in my veins at a rate that meant that 
something had to be done. For, after Alaska has 
once laid her spell over a man or woman, in nine 
limes out of ten, she will claim him or her from 
that time onward to the end of life as her devoted 
and always loyal slave. I know not, nor have I 
ever found any who did know, what it is that 
makes one who has ever lived in Alaska, and 
who has left there, unhappy and discontented until 
they go back once more to the land of gold. 

I have soon and Talked with old "sourdoughs," 
trappers and dog team freighters, and they all tell 
the same story. A\Tien the first big cleanup had 
been made in Dawson, I remember well, the winter 
following found a mob of big, boisterous, pleasure 
loving, money spending, carefree and happy hearted 



104 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

Klondike miners in the hotels of Seattle, San Fran- 
cisco and New York. They lived on nothing but 
the choicest steaks and the richest wines, and the 
sight of a plate of beans would start a fight. Then 
they would all come back to Seattle in the spring, 
sick, feverish, unhappy, with a look in their eyes 
like that of a mother hungering for her lost babe. 
In Seattle they would spend a restless week, but 
when they struck the trail at White Horse just 
before the spring breakup in the Yukon every man 
jack of them was himself again— jolly, joyous, care- 
free, full voiced and filled with the enthusiasm of 
a two-year-old. 

Why, I have known more than one broad shoul- 
dered giant of the trail grow as sick and puny as a 
singed kitten while waiting in Seattle for his boat 
to take him, late in February or early in March, to 
Skagway. I knew one miner, who in health was 
six feet five inches tall, weighing two hundred and 
forty pounds without an ounce of fat on him, come 
Avithin an ace of dying witli quick consumption, 
which it afterv/ards proved was due to his longing 
for the biting wind that blows from the top of 
Alaska's Coast Range and bears company with the 
wayfarer down in the valle.y of the Yukon past the 
lakes and into the gold camps of the Klondike. 

Well, all this came to me then as I realized that 
Swiftwater Vx'as o>one \orth once more in search 



f SWIFTWATER BILL. 105 

of gold, but, with Bera in Seattle and the two 
babies, I was shackled as securely as any one of the 
wretches who walk the streets of this city with 
chains and ball working out a sentence for 
vagrancy. 

It is not a less remarkable thing to be told of 
Swiftwater that he turned Dame Fortune's wheel 
once more with the dial pointing m his direction as 
quickly as he had raised the necessary money in San 
Francisco to make a new start in Fairbanks. To 
all who know of Swiftwater 's kaleidoscopic changes 
from rich to poor, and back again to rich, it seems 
as if the fickle Dame, carrying a magic horn spilling 
gold in all directions, folloAved Swiftwater w^herever 
he went into Alaska and out again, down to the 
cities of the States and back again, and, if she 
seemed to lose him for a w^hile, always to welcome 
him back with a winning smile. 

Of course, it is pai't of my story that after Swift- 
water had amassed another fortune on Cleary Creek, 
in the Tanana, and his friend, Mr. Marks, who had 
grubstake him, sought to obtain his rights in the 
property, it was found that the contract betw^een 
them written by Swiftwater was as full of holes as 
a sieve. Again the lawyers went to work earning 
big fees in the litigation which Marks brought to 
compel Swiftwater to do the honorable thing— to 
do that b}^ him which any man in Alaska, at least 



106 SWIFTWATER BILL. ' ^ 

while he lived there, never failed to do— to divide 
with the man who grubstaked him. 

Now, Swiftwater, as my reader has by this time 
safely guessed, was made in a different mould. They 
used to say in the early days when the stories of 
the incredible richness of Eldorado's gold lined 
bedrock were told on the ''outside," that when a 
man in Alaska drank the water of the country, the 
truth left him. I have never, for my own part, fully 
determined whether this is true, and I may frankly 
say that in some of my experiences, the opportuni- 
ties for judging of the truth or falsity of this theory 
were limited, the reason being that most of the men 
drink something beside water in that country. 

As for Swiftwater Bill, he never did drink any- 
thing but v/ater— I never knew him to take a drop 
of any intoxicating liquors or wine— so that if the 
water of Alaska had any demoralizing effect on 
SwiftAvater, it must have been in the direction of 
his sense of business honor and integrity and a 
decent sense of his obligations as a husband and 
a father. And I am satisfied, too, that the water 
of Alaska, if such was the demoralizing agent in 
Swiftwater 's case, certainly worked terrific havoc. 




SWIFTWATER BILL GATES. FREDDIE GATES AT RIGHT, 
AND CLIFFORD GATES. AT BOTTOM. 




CHAPTER XIV. 
WIFTWATER BILL had struck it 

On Number 6 Cleary Creek, in the 
Tanana, the man who gained his 
chiefest fame in the early days of 
Dawson by walking around the rap- 
ids of Miles Canyon, because ho was afraid to navi- 
gate them, thereby earning his cognomen, ''Swift- 
water Bill, ' ' had found another fortune in the yellow 
gold that lines countless tens of thousands of little 
creeks and dr}^ gulches in that great northern 
country— Alaska. 

Swiftwater had obtained a big working interest 
in the mine on Cleary Creek, a stream that has 
produced its millions in yellow gold. And, after 
the first discovery of placer gold in paying quanti- 
ties in the Tanana, the whole Western coast of the 
American continent knew the story. Like Dawson, 
the toAvn of Fairbanks ([uickly sprang from the soil 
as if reared by the magic of some unseen genii of 
the Arabian Nights. 

Of course, the word came out to me in a letter 
from a friend at Fairbanks. And I sometimes think 
that, after all, I must have had a great many friends 
in Alaska who remembered the hard task that the 



108 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

fates had put upon me when thoy made me, through 
no wish of my own, the mother-in-law of SAviftwater 
Bill. 

As I remember now, the news that Swiftwater 
had struck another pay streak impressed upon me 
the necessity of immediate action. Swiftwater 's 
previous conduct, particularly that $100 dinner that 
he gave in Seattle a few months before, had taught 
me one thing, and that was that if Gates was ever 
to do the square thing by me and by Bera and 
the babies it would be only when some one with 
sufficient will power to accomplish the task would 
reach him and see that he did not forget his duty. 
■ Now, it is no May day holiday for a woman to 
"mush" over the ice from the coast of Alaska to 
the interior mining camps. First you have to get 
an outfit in Seattle, and by that I mean sufficient 
heav}^ underclothing, outer clothing, heavy boots, 
furs and sleeping bag and the like to make Travel 
over the ice comfortable. Ten years ago any woman 
who made that journey — that is, from Dyea over the 
mountain passes covered with glaciers and thence 
down the Upper Yukon on the ice — was considered 
almost as a heroine and the newspapers were eager 
to print the stories of such exploits. When I de- 
termined to go into the Tanana to find Swiftwater 
mining gold on Number 6 Cleary there were few, 
if any. of the eomf(>rts of present-day winter travel 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 109 

on the Valdez-Fairbanks trail, such as horse stages 
and frequent road-houses. 

Consequently, I determined to follow the old 
route, and I went to Skagway, thence over the White 
Pass road to White Horse and, crossing Lake Le- 
Barge on the ice, there to await the departure for 
Dawson of the first down river steamer. 

It was in the early spring of the year— that is, 
early for Alaska, although when I left Seattle the 
orchards were in bloom and lawns were as green 
as in mid-summer. Lake Le Barge was still frozen 
over, and the upper waters . of the Yukon 
were beginning to show their first gigantic 
unrest of that spring— a mighty unrest that carries 
with it the movement of vast ice gorges down the 
canyon of the Upper Yukon to the Klondike, and 
which, if suddenly halted on its way to the sea by 
an unexpected drop in temperature, is likely to work 
havoc with men and propertj^ and sometimes human 
lives. 

The Yukon River is not like any other stream 
on the American continent with which you and I are 
familiar. It seems to be a thing alive when the 
spring sun begins to loosen the icy chains that bind 
it hard and fast to old Mother Earth through eight 
long and dreary winter months. No greater phe- 
nomena of nature, showing the change that spring 
brings to all forms of life— human, animal and plant 



110 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

—is to be found anywhere than the awakening of 
the Yukon River after her voiceless sleep. 

At White Horse the freight for Dawson and 
the Tanana mines was stacked twenty feet high 
in all directions when we boarded the first steamer 
and followed the ice jam down the river to Dawson. 
Eventually, on a little steamer that plied between 
Dawson and Fairbanks when the ice is far enough 
gone to make navigation safe, I made my way to the 
chief mining camp of the Tanana— Fairbanks, 
named after the vice-president, who visited the 
North when he was a senator from Indiana. 

I had no trouble in finding Gates. 

" Swif twater, " I said, ''I am here to have you 
provide for your wife and children, and to pay at 
least part of what 3^ou owe me." 

Bill was courteous, suave, obliging and well man- 
nered. 

"Mrs. Beebe," said Bill, "at last I am fixed so 
that I can do the right thing by you and all others. 
As soon as I can make my last payment on my 
Cleary Creek property, I will square everything up, 
and give you plenty of money for Bera and the 
boys." 

Now, I know that everyone who reads this little 
book w411 say to themselves : 

"If Mrs. Beebe don't get her money now, she 
eertainlv is foolish." 



SWIFTWATER BILL. Ill 

Swiftwater, to be sure, saAv that my hotel bills 
were paid and told me every day that in a short 
time he would clean up enough gold to make him- 
self independent, and provide bountifully for Bera 
and the two boys— and I believed him. 

Swiftwater 's sister, the mother of Kitty, his po- 
lygamous wife, was, I quickly learned, living in a 
tent on Bill's claim, waiting to lay hold of him 
and his money as soon as the clean-up was finished. 
Long before this he had deserted Kitty, and in all 
the turmoil and trouble that came after his bigamous 
marriage to his niece I had lost all track of that 
unfortunate girl. 

I remember now how odd it struck me that Swift- 
water's sister was there, living in a little white 
canvas tent, and enduring the privations which any 
Avoman must suffer in that country, while I, actuated 
by the same desire, was waiting for Swiftwater to 
finish washing up the dumps on his claims. And I 
recalled at the time that when Swiftwater mined 
thousands of gold from his claims in the Klondike 
he allowed his own mother to cook in a cabin of a 
miner on a claim not far from his own, and although 
rich beyond his fondest dreams had permitted that 
poor woman to earn her own living by the hardest 
kind of drudgery and toil. 







CHAPTER XV. 

WIFT WATER'S cleanup on Number 6 
Cleary Creek was $75,000 in gold. 
The summer was come to an end and 
there were signs on the trees, in 
the crackling of the frosted grass in 
the early morning and in the bite of 
the night wind from the mountain canyons that told 
of the quick approach of winter in the Tanana. 
Swiftwater had been more than usually fortunate. 
His mine on Number 6 Cleary had yielded far be- 
yond his expectations. Swiftwater had every reason 
to believe his friends who told him that his luck 
was phenomenal. 

As there are compensating advantages and dis- 
advantages in almost every phase of human life in 
this world, it may possibly be said that as an offset 
to Swiftwater 's phenomenal luck, he had two 
women, the mothers of his two wives, waiting pa- 
tiently at Fairbanks for him to bring out enough 
money to properly provide for his families. I had 
told Swiftwater : 

'*I am up here to take good care of you. Bill, and 
incidentally to see that you provide enough money 
to feed and clothe vour children and 3^our wife. I 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 113 

don't care anything about that other woman over 
there." 

Bill laughed, and said it was probably a lucky 
thing for him that he had a mother-in-law to look 
after his welfare. But if Swiftwater's mind ever 
hovered around the idea of criminal proceedings on 
the score of bigamy, he did not give voice to it. He 
merely went around in his cheerful way from day 
to day working vigorously with his men until, finally, 
early in September, the last of the pay dirt was 
washed from the dumps into the sluice boxes and 
the gold sacked and taken to the bank. 

Then Bill began paying off his debts. He settled 
Avith his partners, and then with a big chunk of bills 
and drafts in his inside pocket we started for 
Seattle. 

It was getting winter rapidly and we had no time 
to lose in order to catch the steamship "Ohio,' at 
St. Michael, for Seattle, before the winter freeze-up 
on Bering Sea. 

Swiftwater, while working on Number 6 Cleary, 
had been all business and activity. Now, he seemed 
on the little boat going down the Tanana to be his 
old self again— by that I mean that Swiftwater re- 
verted to his conduct of early days, which had lead 
some people to believe that he was descended from 
the Mormon stock back in Utah. Why Swiftwater 
had never earned the title of the Brigham Young of 



114 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

the Klondike instead of the Knight of the Golden 
Omelette or just plain Swiftwater, I never could 
quite understand. 

At Fairbanks Swiftwater induced a woman, whose 
name I shall not give at this time, to board the 
steamer for the outside. A half day's further ride 
took us to Chena, and there Swiftwater met another 
friend by the name of Violet— a girl who had worked 
as housekeeper and cook for a crowd of miners dur- 
ing the summer because her husband had deserted 
her and left her penniless in Fairbanks. 

This Violet was young and comely, and of gentle 
breeding. The hard life in the mining camps of 
the Yukon and the bitterness she had suffered at 
the hands of her truant husband had taken a little 
of the natural refinement from the girl and had 
probably shaped her life so that the better side could 
not be seen. 

Be that as it may, Violet came with Swiftwater, 
but, when she foimd on the steamship ^'Ohio" that 
Swiftwater had tipped one of the crew $100 so as 
to enable him to have a seat Avith a woman on each 
side of him at his meals, Violet refused to have 
anything to do with him. 

At St. ]Michael, when I found that Swiftwater 
thought more of the association of women and of 
having his kind of a good time than of providing for 
his wife and children, I made up my mind that there 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 115 

would have to be a showdown of some kind. I 
telegraphed to Bera at Seattle : 

''Swiftwater is coming down on the Ohio. You 
had better see him now, if you want anything." 

We were nine days making the trip from St. 
Michael to Seattle. When the crowd on the boat 
learned that Swiftwater Bill was on board, every- 
body looked for fireworks and a good time. The 
captain ordered notice put up in the dining room, 
reading : 

"Gambling positively prohibited on this boat." 

Swiftwater saw that sign and gently laughed to 
himself. 

''Mrs. Beebe," he said, *'I am going to have 
some fun with the boys. So if I come to borrow 
some money from you, don't be foolish and refuse 
me." 

Swiftwater had some few hundred in cash, but 
most of his money was in drafts, which he could not 
cash on the boat. When I found that the boys 
had started a little poker game, I expected Swift- 
water to be coming to me for money in a little 
while, and sure enough he did. 

"Swiftwater," I said, "as long as you play poker 
you can't have any money from me, because you 
know you can't play poker. But if you will start 
a solo game I will let you have a little change." 

Now, Swiftwater swelled up visibly because he 



116 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

knew that I thought he was one of the best solo 
players in all the North, and I have to laugh even 
now to recall that after the first fifteen minutes of 
play at solo the men who had sought to fleece him 
of his money, found they had no chance and they 
all stopped the game. 

It was late Saturday afternoon when finally the 
Ohio poked her nose in front of one of the docks 
in Seattle. There Avas a strong ebb tide, and it was 
nearly an hour before the gang plank was run 
ashore. We docked jam up against a little steamer 
on our left, and Swiftwater, being in a hurry to 
get ashore, asked me if I would take his grip in the 
carriage to the Cecil Hotel and he would join me in 
a little while, after he could get a shave. With 
that Swiftwater jumped to the deck of the little 
steamer next to us and thence to the dock and was 
gone. 

I went direct to the Cecil Hotel, where Bera was 
waiting for me. Before I had been there a half 
hour the newsboys on the streets were crying the 
sale of the Seattle Times : 

''All about Swiftwater Bill arrested for bigamy." 
I heard the shrill voices of the urchins from my 
window in the hotel and I said: 

"Bera, what have you done— had him arrested?" 

I rang the bell and told the bell-boy to bring up 

a copy of The Times. Sure enough, there was the 



SWIFTWATER BILL, 117 

whole story of a warrant issued for Swiftwater Bill 
on the charge of bigamy and a long yarn about his 
various escapes in Alaska, including a recital of how 
he ruined the life of young Kitty Gates, his niece, 
by eloping with her and marrying her while he was 
still the laAvful husband of Bera. 

Just about dusk— I think it must have been at 8 
o'clock that evening— there came a knock at the 
door. I went to answer it, and there in the hall of 
the hotel stood a man who was an absolute stranger 
to me. 

^'Mrs. Beebe?" 
''This is Mrs. Beebe." 

''Swiftwater wants to see you. I am Jack Wat- 
son, who used to be with him in the north." 
"Where is he?" I asked. 

"I can't tell you where he is, Mrs. Beebe," said 
the man, "but if you will go with me I can find 
him." 

Five minutes later we were on First Avenue, 
which was crowded with thousands of sightseers, 
it being Saturday night, and everybody seemed to 
be out for a good time. Watson led me up Spring 
Street to the alley between First and Second Ave- 
nues and then went down the alley till, reaching 
the shadow of a tall building, he said: 
' ' Please wait here a minute, Mrs. Beebe. ' ' 
I looked down at the brilliantly lighted street cor- 



118 SWIFT WATER BILL. 

ner on First Avenue, where is situated the Rainier- 
Grand Hotel, and there I saw Swiftwater standing, 
smoking a cigar, while hundreds of people were 
passing up and down the sidewalk. He little 
looked as if the deputy sheriffs were after him. 

In a moment Watson had brought Swiftwater to 
me. 

**Mrs. Beebe," said Swiftwater, "what did you 
wire to Bera? Did you tell her I was coming out 
and to have me arrested?" 

''I certainly wired her," said I, "and, Swift- 
water, if she's had you arrested that's your busi- 
ness." 

"Mrs. Beebe, you've been the only friend I've 
ever had and now you have thrown me down," said 
the miner. 

Said I, "Swiftwater, I have not thrown you down, 
and it's about time that you showed some indication 
of trying to do what is right by me and Bera and 
the babies." 

"Here's that $250 I borrowed from you on the 
boat," said Swiftwater, "and I guess after all that 
you are really the only friend I ever had in this 
world. Won't you tell me what to do now?" 

I hesitated a moment and then it seemed to 
me that there was little to be gained by having 
Swiftwater thrown into jail without any chance 
whatever to secure his release on bail. In spite 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 119 

of all that I had suffered from him, and all the 
untold misery and humiliation that he had put upon 
my daughter Bera, I felt sorr^^ for Swiftwater. 

''You had better take this $250 back," said I, 
''as you may have to get out of town tonight. Have 
you any other money on you?" 

*'Not a cent," said he. 

"Very well, you can pay me that money you 
OAve some other time," I said. 

Then Swiftwater and I fell to talking as to what 
had best be done. He wanted very much to see 
Bera and the babies and begged me, if I thought it 
safe, to take him to the hotel. Finally, seeing the 
big crowd on the streets, I consented, and together 
we went to the Cecil, entered the elevator and then 
went directly to my rooms. 

Bera was there with the boy Freddie— the young- 
est. Swiftwater kissed Bera and the baby, but 
Bera turned away and went into another room, the 
tears streaming down her face. 

"Mrs. Beebe," said Swiftwater, "the penitentiary 
will be my fate unless this bigamy charge is with- 
drawn. You and Bera and the babies will lose if 
I go to state's prison, and that is where Kitty Gates 
will send me unless Bera will get a divorce." 

Just then there came a loud rap at the door, and 
without waiting for either of us to speak the door 
was opened and in walked two deputy sheriffs. They 
immediately placed Swiftwater under arrest. 




CHAPTER XVL 

S A VERACIOUS chronicler of the 
events, inexplicable and unbelievable 
as this story may appear, of the life 
and exploits of Swiftwater Bill Gates, 
I want to begin this chapter with the 
prefatory announcement that, all and 
singular, as the lawyers say, the statements herein 
are absolutely true and may be verified. 

I give this simple warning merely because, as I 
recall what happened the next two or three days 
?fter Swiftwater 's arrest, it seems to me that many 
of my readers will say, "These things could not have 
happened." 

Swiftwater, calmly seating himself, in a big leath- 
er upholstered Morris chair, said, looking at the 
Sheriff; "Old man, I guess we can fix this thing 
up right here. Send for the judge and have him 
come down here quick. ' ' 

The officer looked at me and smiled. 
"I don't want to see M'r. Gates put in jail to- 
night" said I. "And if there is any way that this 
thing can be settled T am willing. More than that," 
and here I looked at Swiftwater, "I think Bill will 
not make any attempt to escape, and if it is all right 
Avith you, ril go on his bond." 



SWIFT WATER BILL. 121 

After more palaver of this kind, and here I am 
about to tell something about judicial processes 
that will surely cause a smile, a messenger was sent 
from the hotel to another hotel, where was stopping 
Judge Hatch, who was sitting on the Superior 
Court bench in King County, althotigh he lived in 
another county down the Sound. 

Outside in the hall there were a score of people, 
waiting to see Swiftwater, and to learn what would 
be the outcome of the case. There was the sheritl', 
Lou Smith ; two other deputies, a half dozen lawyers 
and the reporters for the Seattle newspapers— quite 
a colony altogether. 

After half an hour the judge came in the room, 
accompanied by another deputy sheriff. 

"We'd just as well have some of the lawyers in 
here," said Swiftwater. "Ask Mr. Murphy and 
Mr. Cole to come in." 

The door was opened and in came the attorneys 
and some others. 

"Will you please ring the bell, Mrs. Beebe?" said 
Swiftwater. 

I rang the bell, the boy came and Swiftwater or- 
dered two pint bottles of wine. 

Now, this was Swiftwater 's way of dallying with 
justice. It was another exemplification of his idea 
—the mainspring in the man's whole character- 
that money could do anything and everything. 



122 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

The wine came, two bottles at a time and then 
four, and then six. Every time the boy came up, 
Swiftwater borrowed money from me to pay the 
bill. Then Swiftwater did something that I never 
believed could happen. The National Bank at Fair- 
banks had, a few weeks before, issued its first cur- 
rency—the first government bank notes in all 
Alaska. Swiftwater had a bunch of the new $20 
bills and, wrapping in each a nugget taken from 
Number 6 Cleary, he presented one to each of his 
friends— that is, all who were present. 

''If Mr. Gates will deposit $2,250, as counsel for 
Mrs. Gates desires, which is to be applied for the 
maintenance of herself and children and for attor- 
ney's fees, I think we may continue this matter until 
a later date," said the judge. 

Swiftwater came over to me. 

"I've got a thousand dollar draft," said he, "and 
if you wull loan me $1,250 I'll pay everything up 
Monday," said Swiftwater. 

I have never yet fully made up my mind what led 
me to loan Swiftwater that money, unless it was 
that, like everyone else who knew oi his wonderful 
capacity for getting money rapidly out of the North, 
I believed he would make good all of his promises. 
I gave him the money, and Swiftwater was a free 
man. 

Just then the sheriff himself open-^d the door and, 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 123 

noticing one of the lawyers holding a bunch of bills 
and drafts in his hand, said: 

' ' I guess I will take charge of this. ' ' 

And so it came about that the money was depos- 
ited in the clerk's office in the coimty court, and on 
Monday morning, before any of us were about, the 
lawyers for Bera, Murphy & Cole, appeared in the 
courthouse with an order signed by the judge to 
draw the money out. Bera got $750 of the $1,000 
promised her for maintenance for herself and chil- 
dren and the lawyers got the remainder. 

Is it any wonder, then, that I have often thought 
it was the easiest thing in the world for Swift water 
to find a loophole in the meshes of the law by which 
he could escape, while I have never yet found a 
way to make the law give me just common justice? 

And now it was Swiftwater's turn to act. In 
another day the newspapers had his story that he 
had been ' ' held up, ' ' and after that came a sensation 
in the Bar Association of Seattle the like of which 
is not on record. And while the lawyers were fight- 
ing over the spoils, Swiftwater cleverly enough, 
though haunted by the spectre of the state prison, 
and constantly pressed by Kitty Gates, his polyga- 
mous wife, began working on Bera's sympathies. He 
came to the hotel and went to Bera *» room. 

''Bera," he said, "unless you get a divorce from 
me, and do it at once, Kitty will send me to the 



124 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

penitentiary; I will lose all my property in Alaska, 
and the boys and you will be everlastingly dis- 
graced." 

Bera listened. It is enough to say that with 
Swiftwater in the penitentiary, his mining interests 
in Alaska, which promised brighter than anything 
he had ever undertaken, and that means hundreds 
of thousands of dollars, all of Bera's chance and 
mine to ever get a new start in life would have 
been wasted. 

Swiftwater daily said: 

''Bera, you certainly love the boys enough to save 
them the disgrace of having a felon for a father." 

The argument was enough. Bera consented, and 
although, as I understand it, the law specifically 
prohibits a divorce where the parties agree in ad- 
vance on the severance of the holy marriage tie, 
Swiftwater went away and Bera brought suit for 
divorce in the court of King County. And in time 
the decree was granted and is still of record in that 
county. 

A week later Swiftwater, as I afterwards found 
out, joined Kitty Gates in Portland and the two 
went to San Francisco. Thus can be turned into the 
basest uses the legal processes of our courts and, 
strange as it may seem, Swiftwater, after Bera's di- 
vorce, legally married Kitty, then divorced her, and 
not later tlinn two years afterwards he told the 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 125 

newspapers in San Francisco, that having divorced 
all his other wives, he was looking for a new one. 
I want to ask now, is there no law to reach a 
monster of this kind? Are the laws so framed that 
men of Swiftwater's type can go at large throughout 
the country ruining the lives of young girls, and, 
followed by a halo of gold and the fame that quick 
fortune making brings, claiming and receiving the 
friendship of their fellow men ? 



CHAPTER XVII. 



AM getting to the end of my story, and as the 
finish draws near, it seems to me, that I have 
not quite done justice by Swift water Bill, in 
at least one respect— and that is the activity 
and agility the man d^plays when events over 
which he might have had control, had he been on 
the square, crowded him so closely, that like the 
proverbial flea, he had to hike. And in telling of 
Swiftwater's talent in this direction, I wish to be re- 
garded as speaking as one without malice, but rather 
as admiring Swiftwater for trying, in so far as lay in 
his power, to make good his nickname of Swiftwater. 

In San Francisco, after Swiftwater had obtained 
a divorce from Kitt}^, he immediately announced his 
intention of getting another wife. For Swiftwater 
knew that the prison gates which once had yawned 
in his face were now closed, and, better even than 
that, was the thought that I— his loving mother-in- 
law— would no longer be interested in his future. 

It is undoubtedly true that in Swiftwater's menta' 
processes he regarded first, the hundreds of thou- 
sands of dollars in gold that lay in the pay streak 
on No. 6 Cleary, in the Tanana, and I can see Bill 
now in my mind's eye, facing an array of cut glass 
decanters, embroidered table cloths, potted plants, 



SWIFTWATBR BILL. 127 

orchestra and all that goes with the swell cafes of 
San Francisco, eating his dinner and rubbing his 
hands with glee as he remembered how easily he had 
obtained a fortune from me, which he sunk on 
Quartz Creek in the Klondike, and then slid out of 
paying his debt to me. 

The very next season found Swiftwater in the 
Tanana and this time, according to the best official 
records I could obtain, his clean-up w^as not less 
than $200,000. But I had not forgotten that Swift- 
water had told me, first that Number 6 Cleary was 
a bigger proposition even than Quartz Creek, and 
that Gold Stream was one of the richest of all the 
undeveloped creeks in the whole Tanana. 

For this last information, I will say, I have al- 
ways been grateful to Swiftwater, because his be- 
lief that the time would come when Gold Stream 
would be one of the best producers in all Alaska, 
led me to obtain several claims there. And now, let 
it be known, his prediction has been fully and com- 
pletely verified. 

But, knowing nothing of Gold Stream, and remem- 
bering only that Swiftwater had added more than 
$1,000 to his already great obligations to me, and had 
provided nothing for his family, I journeyed once 
more across the Coast Range of Alaska. 

Crossing on the railway from Skagway to White 
ITorse, I met a score or more of traders with their 



128 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

outfits of provisions and fresh vegetables, all hurry- 
ing: to get into Dawson as soon as the ice broke 
up, to sell their wares to the miners of the Klondike 
at fancy prices. There were several w^omen in the 
party, some of them bent on joining- their husbands 
in Dawson. 

Three hours ride down the river on a scow, laden 
with freight of every character, we struck a sand 
bar and were compelled to spent the night in mid- 
stream, absolutely without even a crust of bread to 
eat, and heaven's blue our only canopy. The 
grounding of freight scoavs in the upper waters of 
the Yukon in the spring is a common experience, 
and in those days little care was taken to protect the 
passengers from suffering hardship and real danger. 
That night the icy winds blew from the mountain 
ranges sixty miles an hour, and we suffered severely, 
not having a mouthful of food since the morning 
before. 

The captain of the scow, oblivious to his obliga- 
tions to his passengers, had loaned the only small 
boat he had to a pair of miners the day before. 
We could do nothing until they returned. Finally, 
after we had been on the bar for more than twelve 
houi's, the men came back Avith the boat and took 
us, two at a time, ashore. 

Then, guided by traders, the women in the party 
were told to walk down the stream fifteen miles to 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 129 

where there was a camp. It was bitter cold and 
the trail was hard to walk. In the afternoon of the 
day following our shipwreck, we stopped and the men 
built a bonfire, while the poor women fell almost 
unconscious in front of it, completely exhausted 
for want of food, which we had not tasted for 
twenty-four hours. 

Two of the traders went down to the river's 
bank and on the other side they espied a camp of 
a herder, beneath the shelter of an abandoned bar- 
racks. This was the only human habitation within 
miles. The traders procured a boat and took us 
women across the river. The herder had some ba- 
con and some dry bread, which he cooked for us. 
Now, I want to say that never in my life have I ever 
eaten anything that tasted so good as that meal, con- 
sisting only of fried bacon strips placed with the 
gravy on top of two slices of cold dry bread, and a 
teacup of hot coffee to wash it down with. 

That day the scow came down the river and again 
we boarded it and finally reached Lake Lebarge. 
The lake was still frozen over and we started to 
cross its thirty miles of icy surface with horses draw- 
ing sleds. The ice was getting rotten and four 
times in as manj^ miles, to my constant terror, the 
horses broke through the ice, threatening every min- 
ute to drag me w^ith them. Becoming weary of this, 



130 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

I left the sled and hired a dog team and outfit to 
take me across the lake. 

At Clark's road house, I remained a week and 
then boarded a scow and went through Thirty-Mile 
river to board the steamer Thistle for Dawson. Go- 
ing down the river on a scow, one scow that was 
lashed to ours, struck a rock in midstream, a hole 
was knocked into our scow, which almost sunk. 
The bank of the river was lined with thousands of 
people camping or moving on towards the Klondike. 
These people came to our rescue and with ropes and 
small boats helped us off. 

In Fairbanks once more, I found Swiftwater. I 
had telephoned him of my coming, and in a day or 
two he came to my hotel. 

''Mrs. Beebe," he said, "here is $50 for your 
present hotel bills. I must go back to Cleary Creek 
at once, but I will be back again inside of a week, 
and then I will straighten everything up." 

When Swiftwater told me that, I believed him— 
for the last time— for the next morning I found that 
he had left my room to board a train for Chena, on 
the Tanana, with a draft for $50,000 in his inside 
pocket, $10,000 more in cash and a ticket for Seattle. 

Swiftwater undoubtedly believed, that being with- 
out money I would be compelled to remain an im- 
limited time in Fairbanks. Not so. I still had a 
little jewelry left that he had not persuaded me to 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 131 

pawn or sell for his benefit, and on this I raised 
enough money to buy a ticket to Seattle. 

Before I could get there, Swiftwater learned of 
my coming, and when I arrived on Elliott Bay, 
he had applied to the Federal Courts to be 
adjudged a bankrupt and had assigned to Phil Wil- 
son all his interests in the Tanana, amounting to 
untold wealth. 

That case of Swiftwater 's is still pending in the 
Federal Court in Seattle, and no judge and no court 
has ever yet, up to this writing, consented to de- 
clare him a bankrupt, although, he has successfully 
placed his property in the Tanana beyond the reach 
of the scores of men who have befriended him in 
the past without reward on his part. 




CHAPTER XVIII. 

GAIN it is spring, and I sit all alone in 
my room in Seattle, knowing that the 
city is filled with miners, their faces 
set in the direction of the Golden North, 
their hearts beating with high hopes, their breasts 
swelling with the happy purpose of getting back 
once more to the glacier bound, gold lined gravel 
beds of Alaska— the treasure land of the world. I 
know that I cannot go with them, for Swift water 
has robbed me of almost every farthing I ever pos- 
sessed. 

I read in the Seattle papers that scores of the 
old-timers are in the hotels down town, laying up 
stores of supplies, mining outfits, etc., ready for a 
big summer's season of work in the north, of digging 
far below the surface to the eternally frozen bedrock, 
in search of the only thing which is imperishable 
among all the perishable things of this earth— GOLD. 
I can see them thronging the hotel lobbies, the bars, 
and the cafes— great, burly, broad-shouldered, big- 
chested men of the North— the bone and sinew of the 
greatest gold-producing country in the world. 

Many have bought their tickets and state-room 
reservations for the first Nome steamers, weeks in 
advance, unmindful of the fact that their ship must 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 133 

plough her dangerous way through great icebergs 
and ice floes in Bering Sea. Scores of others are 
planning to take the first boats of the spring season, 
while yet winter lingers with heavy hand on Alaska's 
coast and inland valleys, on their way to Valdez and 
thence over the ice to the Tanana, four hundrea 
miles away. No thought of cold, or hardship, or 
danger deters any of these men, and even women, 
because they know at the end of the journey their 
mission will not be valueless, and that for at least a 
great proportion of them there will be a real shin- 
ing pot of gold at the end of their rainbow of hope- 
where 'er they find it— even though they must needs 
go as far as the rim of the Arctic Circle. 

Many of my friends tell me that Swiftwater's life 
story, as I have set it down here, recounting only the 
facts, sparing nothing, adding nothing, will be eager- 
ly read by tens of thousands of Alaska people. If 
this is true, then will Swiftwater be known in his 
true light to all that multitude of adventurous men 
and women of the North, who come and go through 
Seattle, fall and spring, spring and fall, like the 
myriads of Alaska's water fowl who seek the sunny 
South in October, to speed their way north again in 
the spring, the moment the ice floes in the headwaters 
of the Yukon are gone. 

And now, as I survey my work, I am movfed to 
ask all who read, if they can answer this question : 



134 SWIFTWATER BILL. 

''What manner of man, in Heaven's name, is this 
Swiftwater Bill Gates?" 

Yes, what manner of man, or other creature is 
Swiftwater? Perhaps some people will say that 
when Swiftwater Bill, down deep in his prospect 
hole on Eldorado, looked upon the glittering drift 
of gold that covered the bedrock, the glamor of that 
shining mass gave him a sort of moral blindness, 
from which he has never recovered. It is possible 
that the lure of gold, which he had seen in such 
boundless quantities, had so entered into his very 
soul that all sense of his duty and obligations as a 
man may have been dwarfed or utterly eliminated. 

Be that as it may, Swiftwater, after he had placed 
his properties on Cleary Creek in the hands of Phil 
Wilson, so that his creditors could not lay hands on 
any of his money or by any means satisfy their just 
debts, went down into Nevada and plunged heavily 
in Rawhide and Goldfield properties. Rumors 
reached me many times that Swiftwater has made 
another fortune, and the San Francisco papers 
printed such stories about him. His property on 
Number 6 Cleary is still a big producer of gold, 
and it seems that by merely turning his hands, 
Swiftwater could, within a few months, pile up 
enough money to make happy those who have inno- 
cently suffered such grievous wrong at his hands. 
And here my heart grows hard as I think of the 
farce of the law— how fine are its meshes if an inno- 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 135 

cent person is taken — how wide are its loop holes 
when the smooth and oily crook with money becomes 
entangled therein. 

For why is it, that the courts will suffer a lecher- 
ous monster to go abroad in the land, to marry ana 
re-marry without paying the slightest heed to the 
restrictions of the law; to abduct, seduce and then 
abandon young girls and leave them penniless and 
deserted in unknown lands? 

And, why is it that such men can, by using hea-vy 
tips of gold, weigh down the hands of the sworn 
officers of the law, manage to slip unharmed and 
unhampered through counties and states where the 
processes in bankruptcy and in criminal proceeding, 
issued by the courts of law, are out against them ? 

Why is it, then, that a man like Swiftwater could 
come to Seattle at night locked in the drawing room 
of a Pullman car, be taken swiftly in a closed car- 
riage to a steamer bound for Valdez, and remain 
hidden in his stateroom on board the boat for two 
days before the ship sailed, while deputy sheriffs 
w^ere scouring the town to compel him to provide 
from the ample money he had, food and clothing 
for the wife and babies he had deserted? 

Perhaps, after all, Swiftwater 's belief that the 
power of gold is omnipotent, may be the true and 
right one. Gold in the hands of such a man is a 
monstrous implement of crime, of degeneration to 
women and to innocent children. 




CHAPTER XIX. 
AMA/' don't you think you can have 
some fireworks on the Fourth of July 
and come out to the Brothers School 
so that we can celebrate?" 

Little Pi^eddie Gates, Swiftwater's youngest boy, 
looked up in my face with the dearest kind of a 
smile, and put his arm on my shoulder. The little 
fellow had just had his night bath in my room and 
had put on his fresh, clean, white pajamas, ready for 
bed. 

It was Saturday before the Fourth of July and 
Freddie knew that I might not be able to spend 
Sunday with him at the Brothers School— which 
was the first Sunday since Freddie was taken there 
that I had not spent the day with him. 

Now, it may seem odd to you and all the rest, 
who have followed the story of Swnftwater 's fortunes 
and misfortunes, that I have never told you about 
the two dear little boys— Bera's children— who all 
these years have been without a father's care and 
who call their Grandma "Mama." 

And this brings me to the story of how Clifford, 
the child who first saw the light of day on Gold 
Quartz Creek in order to satisfy his father's pride, 
as I have already told, was stolen from me by Lena 
Hubbell, the nurse. Clifford is the oldest boy of 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 137 

the two, and as dear a little fellow and as manly 
and straightforward and handsome as any boy yon 
ever saw in your life. When the papers in Seattle 
told of Swiftwater making a big strike in the Tan- 
ana, Bera and I and all of us felt that at last there 
would be a brighter dawning and a better day, and 
an end of the drudgery and sacrifice and slavish toil 
which had been our portion, 

A day or two after the story of Swiftwater 's gold 
find came over the wires, Lena, into whose custody 
I had placed Clifford, came to me saying: 

"Mrs. Beebe, if you don't care, I'd like to take 
Clifford on a little trip of two or three weeks to Mt. 
Vernon. I have some friends there and I need a 
vacation and a rest." 

I had befriended Lena in- the North and had done 
everything I could for her. I trusted the girl im- 
plicitly and it is not to be wondered at that I quick- 
ly gave her permission to take Clifford with her to 
Mt. Vernon, which is only a half day's ride or less 
from Seattle. 

I told Lena to take good care of the child and be 
sure that she wrote me every few days— and this 
she promised to do. 

Two weeks went by and I heard no word from 
Lena. I feared the child might be ill and wrote 
and then telegraphed \^nthout receiving an answer 



138 SWIFT WATER BILL. 

to either. The last letter was returned to me un- 
opened. 

That afternoon I took the last train for Mt. Ver- 
non, and before I went to bed in the little hotel there, 
I found that my worst fears were true— Lena had 
left, leaving no address, and had taken Clifford with 
her. Later, I found she had taken the boy to Can- 
ada. 

I have not heard directly from Lena and Clifford, 
although I know what fate has befallen the boy, 
and that he is alive and well. Of course, I do not 
know that Lena Hubbell deliberately planned to 
kidnap Clifford, believing that his father, when he 
had amassed another fortune, would pay a large sum 
for his recovery. 

As soon as I had found in Fairbanks that Swift- 
water was coming out, I urged him then and there, 
with all the power and earnestness at my command, 
to send an officer for Lena Hubbell and the child 
into Canada and bring the boy home. 

Swiftwater has not spent a dollar in this endeavor, 
although it has cost me several hundred dollars in 
futile efforts to bring the boy home. 

Those two boys— Clifford and Freddie— are all 
that I have left in this world to live for. Freddie 
is seven years old, bright, plump, well developed 
and very affectionate. It is said of him that he 
learns verj^ quickly and remembers well, and the 



SWIFTWATER BILL. 139 

dear Fathers at the Brothers School at South Park, 
who have taken care of him, fed him and clothed him 
for months without a dollar of Swiftwater's money, 
say that he will some day make a name in the world. 

And now, I am going to take you, my reader, into 
my confidence and tell you something that is sacred. 
These boys, I feel, are my own flesh and blood— my 
own boys. 

If my story will throw some new light on the 
hardships of women who are forced to go to the 
North in search of a livelihood or shall be read with 
interest by all my old friends in Alaska, I shall 
rest content. I have a mission to perform— the care 
and education of my two boys— Clifford and Freddie. 

THE END. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




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